Over Yonder Ice Cream – Memphis Flyer

You might scream with delight when you taste Schuyler O’Brien’s Over Yonder ice cream. It’s over the top.

Take his Georgia Olive Oil ice cream. He mixes an olive oil made in Georgia into the base and then adds a butterscotch finished with a fig balsamic vinegar. “I’ve done a variation of flavors, but the one I like the best is a maple ice cream,” says O’Brien. “And I do a Cheez-It brittle that I fold into it — with cheesy, salty bits in the sweet maple ice cream.

“I’ve got a running list of probably 30 [flavors] that I keep adding to … multiple notebooks where I have ideas on mix-ins and flavor components.”

Pints of his ice cream and ice cream cookie sandwiches with different flavors are at Hog Wild East, BBQ & Market at 921 S. Yates Road. “The flavors rotate weekly. I put out flavors and see how customers like them. Then I’ll do popular flavors.”

O’Brien’s ice cream-making process begins the same way. “The ice cream base is [what] starts every flavor. Just cream, whole milk, egg yolks, sugar. It’s a stirred custard. Just a really good vanilla ice cream without the vanilla.”

Then he lets loose. “For Avocado Chip, I blend avocado in the milk base, spin it, and fold in semi-sweet chocolate chips.”

He also uses cereal as an ingredient. “I steep whatever cereal I use to make that flavor. I like going back to my childhood. Lucky Charms and Cocoa Krispies were my favorites. Apple Jacks, Fruity Pebbles, Cinnamon Toast Crunch.”

His most recent concoction is “a play on espresso Romano. It’s an espresso and sweet-cream ice cream with Meyer lemon. So you get the tart, acidic flavors up front, finished with the coffee, and there are also some bitter caramel notes.”

One of O’Brien’s wildest flavors is made with Blue Note Bourbon barrel staves. “I take a barrel stave and set it on fire and let it ember a little. And I’ll drop it into a pot of cream and milk. I strain it through a cheesecloth and make that into an ice cream base. The cool thing is I add nothing else. No other ingredient other than the burning wood. When you spin it, brown sugar, dark sorghum molasses, and vanilla notes, all that stuff out of the barrel that soaked into the wood, comes out. Once you light it on fire, the cream and milk absorb all that flavor.”

O’Brien gets inspired by others, as well as “just going out to eat myself and seeing things and putting things together I might not have realized before: ‘This might be cool in ice cream.’ Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I have a constantly growing collection of cookbooks in the house. Whenever I get time, I pour a glass of bourbon, pull out books, and go through them.”

He began making his identical ice cream base — a classic French-style crème anglaise — 12 years ago in his advanced baking and pastry class at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Orlando, Florida.

O’Brien now makes his ice cream at the Hog Wild plant in North Memphis. The ice cream is available for weddings and other Hog Wild’s A Moveable Feast Catering events. They’re also available in 3.5-ounce individual containers with wooden gelato spoons.

He collaborates with restaurants, including Longshot, which makes its own cookie sandwiches using one of O’Brien’s flavors. And O’Brien did a salted caramel bleu cheese ice cream with Greys Fine Cheese & Entertaining.

Hen House Wine Bar executive chef Cole Jeanes creates seasonal garnishes to go with O’Brien’s ice cream. Currently, they are offering Strawberry Milk Tea with Thai Basil, Mexican Spiced Chocolate, and Sweet Corn and White Chocolate.

Sitting down to a bowl of his own ice cream is an added bonus. “When I went to the Hen House last week and got to eat my ice cream in a restaurant, it was like a weird, surreal moment.”

Remember those little cups of hard ice cream you ate with a flat wooden spoon at parties when you were in grade school?

So does Schuyler O’Brien. He created “over yonder. delightfully crafted ice cream,” which he serves in 3.5-ounce individual containers with wooden gelato spoons. And the ice cream is soft.

The ice cream is available in the nitro coffee floats at Low Fi Coffee inside Stock & Belle on South Main on Trolley Night, which is held the last Friday of every month. O’Brien plans to eventually sell the containers at Low Fi, but, for now, they can be purchased in quantities of 25 or more through AMF (A Moveable Feast) Catering, where he’s chef de cuisine. “It’s a brand of AMF right now, but I make every single batch,” O’Brien says.

Michael Donahue

Schuyler O’Brien

O’Brien, 29, began making the ice cream 10 years ago. “Same exact recipe,” he says. “This started when I was in culinary school and I made ice cream for the first time.”

He made it in his advanced baking and pastry class at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Orlando, Florida. “I had always seen people make ice cream, but it’s like American ice cream, where you just mix sugar and milk and whatever. Well, what I do is a classic French-style ice cream. So it’s actually a stirred custard. The base is heavy cream, whole milk, and then egg yolks and sugar.”

It’s a crème anglaise — a “classic French sauce” if you don’t freeze it, O’Brien says. “Then once you freeze it, it becomes the ice cream. It’s a super old-school way to make ice cream, but there’s so much labor put into it.”

O’Brien continued to make ice cream after he graduated and worked at Capriccio Grill at The Peabody, Blackberry Farm in Walland, Tennessee, and Catherine & Mary’s, where he was sous chef.

“I’ve had three ice cream machines, all of them the home commercial ones that have the compressor in it,” he says. “Not the ones where you have to freeze the bowl. It’s a pretty big investment for me to just do as a hobby, to have an ice cream machine, but I would always have [ice cream] in the freezer.”

The base is the same, but O’Brien adds different ingredients for the flavors. Among them are a Tahitian vanilla, which he did for Low Fi. “And then I make a goat milk caramel sauce,” he says. “It’s like a tangy caramel sauce made with goat milk. And I swirl the goat milk caramel into the vanilla.”

The container idea dates to his childhood. “We would go to Huey’s back in the day, and you’d get a kid’s meal and they’d give you — I think it was — Klinke ice cream. That has somehow stayed in my head,” O’Brien says. “We could sell pints or even larger containers, but just having that little single-serve, this little bit of ice cream, it’s got nostalgia to it.”

His wooden spoons are concave, but they’re flat on the bottom so all the ice cream can be scraped out of the container.

The ice cream in containers are popular at catering events. “We passed them out when we were cutting the cake for this wedding, and people lost their minds,” he says. “They thought it was the coolest damn thing — that they’re getting these little gourmet ice creams with the cake.”

As for the name, O’Brien wanted something “that was kind of Southern and kind of had some feel to it.”

“Over yonder” with the “delightfully crafted ice cream” tagline “just feels good,” he says.

O’Brien also is in graduate school in the hospitality program at the University of Memphis. And he’s assistant to the director at the Kemmons Wilson Culinary Institute at U of M.

He’s always coming up with new ideas for over yonder. ice cream. “The possibilities are endless,” he says. “And no one is really doing this single-serve-type thing.”

And, O’Brien says, “Next summer, I want to have three or four of those little carts and just roll out there, sell these little portions.”

To order over yonder. ice cream, call AMF Catering at 522-9453.