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Celtic Creamery’s recipes draw on ideas from popular Irish flavors and the North Carolina communities they now serve.
Vacations often have a defining bite. Maybe it’s a bowl of creamy noodles from a family-run restaurant or a flaky pastry from the corner bakery. For Jeff Hogan, it was the ice cream at Sundae’s Ice Cream Parlour, in Ballybunion, Ireland.
Year after year, Hogan would travel from North Carolina to Ireland’s western coast to visit family. Each stop ended the same way: He’d pitch Sundae’s owner Joanna McCarthy to bring her recipes to the United States.
“A lot of people ask you to open a shop in their city,” says McCarthy. “But Jeff was really persistent. I lost track of how many times he asked.”
In 2018, she finally said yes. Today, there are eight Celtic Creamery locations across North Carolina and Florida that serve the recipes McCarthy developed at Sundae’s.
Developing sought-after scoops
McCarthy’s Irish ice cream balances familiar favorites, like vanilla and chocolate, with flavors inspired by her home. Sea & Bee, a bestseller, is her answer to salted caramel. It combines honey, sea salt, and rich Kerrygold butter. Another flavor, the Irish Butter Pecan, is a decadent Irish variation of the Southern classic.
For someone who says that she was “never really an ice cream person,” McCarthy’s approach is remarkably intuitive. She starts with the best ingredients and prioritizes texture.
Many commercial ice creams incorporate more air during churning, known as overrun. McCarthy keeps it to a minimum, which creates a denser, creamier base. The result is rich and indulgent without feeling overly heavy, somewhere between traditional American ice cream and Italian gelato.
Each Celtic Creamery location uses the same equipment and machine settings to create the consistency she spent years perfecting in Ireland. The recipes are built around fresh fruit and made-from-scratch baked goods. The dairy comes from American suppliers, and McCarthy and Hogan spent weeks in the U.S. testing base mixes before choosing one with a milk fat content and quality that are comparable to what she uses in Ireland.
“Whenever possible, I try to use real ingredients rather than just pumping flavors or powders in,” she says.
McCarthy has no formal training. After 17 years as a schoolteacher, she bought a small countertop ice cream maker. She began to tinker with recipes and would share batches with friends for feedback. One machine became six, and overnight production runs became the norm. She opened Sundae’s in 2005, which laid the foundation for what would grow into more than 70 flavors across nine shops on two continents.
Related: The Essential Ice Cream Flavors for All 50 States
The flavor challenges
Not every flavor translated successfully to the U.S. Brown Bread, inspired by Ireland’s beloved soda bread, folds hand-torn, caramelized shards of roasted brown bread into a vanilla-caramel base. Despite its popularity in Ireland, it never found much of an audience in North Carolina.
Conversely, Spiced Roast Pumpkin, a seasonal bestseller in the U.S., generated little enthusiasm back in Ballybunion. Even an American classic sometimes required homework. McCarthy had never encountered a Heath bar flavor in Ireland. She tried it for the first time after she realized its popularity in the U.S. and soon developed her own version.
Today, inspiration flows both ways. At Celtic Creamery’s location in Hendersonville, North Carolina, run by Hogan’s sister, Kim, McCarthy developed Sticky Toffee Apple for North Carolina’s state Apple Festival. She cooked local apples down with butter and sugar before she folded them into apple pie–inspired ice cream.
At the original Carolina Beach shop, a local bacon festival inspired Hogan to ask for a bacon-flavored ice cream.
“Are you off your rocker?” McCarthy remembers she said with a laugh. Trusting Hogan, who she now considers family, McCarthy eventually agreed. The sweet-and-savory flavor, made with caramelized bacon folded into a maple base and more bacon sprinkled on top, was a bestseller.
Related: Why Is Ice Cream So Expensive Right Now?
Ireland remains McCarthy’s “creative compass”
Although she draws inspiration from each of the U.S. locations, Ireland remains McCarthy’s creative compass. A Baby Guinness, a popular Irish pub shot made with Irish cream and coffee, inspired a fun take on coffee ice cream, with rippled Irish cream through the base.
Nearly two decades after she opened a tiny shop in Ballybunion, McCarthy sounds slightly astonished that her recipes, born in a small Irish seaside town, found such an enthusiastic audience an ocean away.
“From the back of nowhere in Ireland, all these people are saying it’s the best ice cream they’ve ever eaten,” she says. “How this has happened is beyond me.”
Read the original article on Food & Wine
