“It takes judgement more than it takes knowledge”: An inside scoop into the art of rolled ice cream

(‘Rolled’, by Incé Husain)

As pop music blares across the pink walls and freshly-curled desserts of Delish Gourmet Rolled Ice Cream, new server Maxim Marmen describes the rolled ice cream craft with tentative two-week expertise.

Marmen explains that rolled ice cream is literally ice cream curled into rolls. The ice cream and its flavor-specific ingredients are thoroughly crushed, worked into a ball and chopped, then spread across a cold metal sheet where it cools and is scraped into signature rolls. Each dessert should take about a minute to make and comprise five to six rolls placed in a bowl and finalized with toppings. 

“It’s such a satisfying thing to look at, seeing the ice cream peel off the plate and roll up in a nice tight ribbon,” says Marmen, sharing that kids often pull up benches to watch the rolls emerge, and other customers take videos. “(The rolls) have to be as tightly coiled as possible. They need to fit the bowl perfectly, no space lost.”

Though the task is sequential, Marmen considers the variability in ice cream flavors, textures, and temperatures to make it distinctly non-repetitive. He discusses his relative ease in making cheesecake and cookie-containing rolled ice creams as compared to the more strenuous Kit-Kat-laden ‘Candy Bar Crave’. 

While cookies are ground into a dust that mixes easily with the ice cream, and cheesecake slices smoothen and dry the ice cream for easier rolling, the sturdy Kit Kat bars disrupt the rolling sequence. Marmen tackles the Kit Kats by placing the uncrushable bits at one end of the spread ice cream so that they are curled into the rolls last, which ensures that the beginning of the rolls are tight and uniform.

“Every ingredient affects (the process) which is why it’s less systematic. You can’t define it,” says Marmen. “Every single slice of cheesecake is a different slice, every cookie is slightly different. You can’t make it a system.” 

Marmen adds that ice cream that is too cold or too warm produces deformed rolls , becoming respectively either too stiff to roll properly or too sticky for rolls to be transported to the bowl undamaged. Additionally, the metal sheet on which rolling occurs is studded with either circular or linear ridges that affect the way the ice cream settles for rolling.

“It is mostly an art,” Marmen summarizes. “You need to alter your solution every single time, there’s too much variability. It takes muscle memory and it takes judgement more than it takes knowledge… There is an intuition.”

Marmen evaluates his two-week ice cream rolling excellence critically, sharing that he sometimes overthinks the rolling process and consequently forgets which ingredients make up the ordered ice cream. He is eager to see how he might improve in the coming months, measuring the success of the craft with aesthetics. 

“We can’t change the (consistency or taste of) ice cream. We can only make it look pretty -  what separates a good ice cream from a bad ice cream is how pretty it looks,” says Marmen.  “Make it as pretty as possible.” ♦