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.”
