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What if eating ice cream was a job?
Apparently, it can be.
I stumbled across a job posting for an International Ice-Cream Taster. Three months. Taste. Travel. Discover. Report.
For Snoop Dogg at Dr. Bombay.
Obviously, I had thoughts.
And somewhere between filling out the application and turning one of my favorite sammiches into an ice-cream flavor, I realized something:
I've been thinking about ice cream for a very long time.
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It all started with Rocky Road.
I was raised by a single father.
Money was tight, and our refrigerator wasn't exactly overflowing. But there were a few things I remember always being there: a Folgers Coffee tin full of bacon grease on top of the stove, a gallon of milk (although it often seemed like there were only a few inches left in the jug) and yellow mustard in the fridge, and somehow, a half-gallon of Rocky Road ice cream in the freezer - the kind in the cardboard box.
Chocolate ice cream. Crunchy almonds. And actual, squishy marshmallows, not a marshmallow cream ribbon.
I don't remember my dad ever explaining why Rocky Road was always there. Looking back, I know it was one of those splurges he made because he knew it made me happy.
Long before I had words like texture, contrast, or food architecture, I knew there was something special about that combination. Creamy. Crunchy. Squishy. Chocolatey. Every spoonful a little different from the one before it.
Rocky Road still tastes like being a kid with my dad. Food does that. A smell, a taste, even the sight of an old cardboard ice-cream carton can take us somewhere we haven't been in years.
Then I started eating ice cream with a Snickers Bar.
By high school, my dad would give me $1.50 in change for lunch money.
I had priorities.
Fifty cents bought a little white Styrofoam bowl piled high with chocolate ice cream, swirled straight out of the machine. Another dollar bought a Snickers bar from the vending machine.
The Snickers was my spoon.
Apparently food architecture started early.
I didn't have the words for it then, but I loved what happened when the two met. The chocolate ice cream would start to melt around the Snickers, getting drippy and almost milkshake-like, while the nougat stayed chewy. The caramel was creamy and sticky. The peanuts brought the crunch and a little salt.
One bite could be cold and creamy, chewy and sticky, crunchy and salty all at once.
I wasn't just eating chocolate with chocolate. I was playing with texture. I was creating little dopamine moments. I just didn't know that's what I was doing yet.
A sammich by any other name would not taste so sweet.
My dad never made sandwiches. He made sammiches.
His were never particularly subtle. There were layers of meat, cheese, pickles, chips, sauce—whatever combination made the whole thing bigger, messier and better.
Years later, my friend Tracey started hosting Bunco every fall, and I looked forward to it partly because I loved seeing my friends and partly because I knew what she was going to make: butternut squash soup and Brie apple sandwiches.
That sandwich stayed in my head.
When I opened The Grotto, I knew I wanted my own version on the menu. Brie. Fig. Apples sautéed with cinnamon. A little garlic butter on the outside, because that never hurts.
People loved our Brie & Apple Sammich.
I can still smell it just thinking about it. When those cinnamon apples were sautéing, the fragrance would move through the restaurant. Warm apple and cinnamon filled the room before the plate ever reached the table.
Then came the rest of it: creamy Brie, sweet fig, warm cinnamon apple that still had some texture, a little feta and that savory garlic-buttered bread.
It wasn't one flavor that made the sammich work. It was how everything played together: the aroma, the temperature, the layers of flavor, the contrast in texture.
I had gone from noticing the dopamine moments to deliberately building them.
Transformation
Years later, I stumbled across a job posting for an International Ice Cream Taster.
One of the application questions asked me to write a social post about a flavor combination I was obsessed with.
And the sammich came back.
Brie. Fig. Cinnamon apple.
But apparently just telling them about the sammich wasn't enough for my brain.
What if it was ice cream?
Creamy Brie ice cream. A thick ribbon of fig jam. Chunks of cinnamon apple that still have a little bite.
And because sometimes extra goodies are extra fun, I'd serve it with a little packet of crushed crackers on the side. Kinda like the toppings tucked into the top of a yogurt cup. Tear it open, dump them in, and suddenly there's another layer of texture and another layer of flavor.
Creamy. Tangy. Jammy. Chewy. Crunchy. Sweet. Salty. Savory.
Every spoonful gets to be a little different, like a conga line for the tastebuds. Hello dopamine bite.