Plum pie cream on a miso cookie and hot rice pudding with seasoned brown butter served with warm galagal ice cream are among Bush Creamery creative shells on the north coast of NSW.
In the world of ice cream suppliers, there are some main fields. Creamy and aerated cups and cones from your local hall. Dense and intensely flavored bells of the Gelaterian neighborhood. Then there is a restaurant ice cream, a totally Alt genre, where chefs do their bases in wild proportions, dial the sugar, freeze hard and then rotate to ask.
For any reason – scale, convenience – these restaurant techniques rarely cross store facades. But in Brunswick, Bush-Creamery’s sleepy heads, a two-day pop-up, is out of coffee Daily Counter, is filling the division. The result can only be the best ice cream in the state.
Roll on Fridays or Saturdays and Wal Foster is in residence. He will take a plum pie from a miso cookie, cover it with pepperberry meringue, blows and end with an Atherton raspberry. It will reap the orange jam in a cup with Jersey milk ice cream and hold it with cultivated cream. It will water the hot rice pudding with seasoned brown butter and will serve with a galango ice cream sphere that warms.
A Pillar Valley boy, Foster learned in Aria before embarking on a cooking career that led him to Melbourne and Europe, where he opened the Drangen Restaurant in Sweden. The dessert work there changed Savory’s Foster’s taste to Sweet, but he lost at home, then, after 6 and a half years, he returned.
“I saw the indigenous gastronomic scene really appearing and just wanted to get in between them – all these beautiful things I grew up,” he says. This, paired with an interest in organic and the rest of the reward that the northern rivers offer rich and floral, sweet shirt, subtropical fruits led to launch natural ice cream from Australia during Covid, which he ran from a caravan. The acclaim followed, but things were not sustainable and the business doubled.
Bush-creamery, thinner and more personal, is Foster’s next act and the results are like nothing more. Normally, ice cream, gelato and even ice cream are agitated as they freeze to keep the ice crystals small and the sensation in the mouth smooth. But in restaurants they are frozen first, then spinned in a Pacojet or (like Foster) on a Mousse FRXSH chef machine, inventions that spin ice cream from the inside out by agitation, really-frosting and under pressure, incorporating near the air.
A factor-and foster can deepen this-it’s about how creeping and turning their ice cream to ask for the texture beautifully, impossibly silky. Another is how this allows him to keep things tasking like themselves. “Most gelato, I find it very sweet, because they need to put a certain amount of sugar in it so that they can shake, freeze and remove for weeks, while mine has about half the amount of sugar because I can shake to ask,” says Foster.
“This means I can focus on the taste of Byron Shire and Northern Rivers, and that’s all.” Other tricks may extend to inoculate their ice cream bases with living cultures, adding layers of complexity.
The rest is due to an obsession with the materials. Eggs and sugar are organic certificates. Oranges of honey and valence come from the backyard of Foster. The Oooray plums and the raspberries of Atherton? He chose them. The milk? Of the farmer and the cheese manufacturer Deb Allard in Burringbar. “She has 200 shirt cows eight minutes north from where I am, so I go to the farm and take 10 or 20 liters of Jersey milk. I was pasteurized, as the day before, and I will enter direct ice cream.”
The best trick, however? How absolutely it is completely accessible. Foster can use all the techniques in the book, but if you didn’t ask, you would never know. You will only prove hot spices and your grandmother’s rice pudding. The sun and the nostalgia of jam and ice cream. Long summer days, bare feet, fresh berries and a flash of your childhood – just better.
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