Jobs in Reviewing: The Ice Cream Man
Meet John Harrison. Take another look at his face and tell me he’s not a man who knows he’s on top of the world. He looks like Carl Reiner as Saul Bloom as Lyman Zerga (Ocean’s fans, you know it’s true).
And there’s a reason Mr. Harrison looks so cunning, so discerning, so goshdarn in control. It’s because he lived the dream. For decades, John Harrison was the master ice cream taster for Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream Inc. (Edy’s for us Midwesterners) But I mean it when I say decades. Seriously, there’s an LA Times article from 1991 detailing him and his job.
So this week, we’re taking a quick look at the man, the profession, and how it all came together. Or you could say…
Here’s the Scoop
John was born into a family that specialized in ice cream and ice cream related accessories. His great-grandfather owned parlors in New York, his grandfather started the first dairy co-op in Tennessee, his father owned an ice cream ingredient company, and his uncle ran an ice cream factory. It was there that John got his start, working summers and becoming an assistant tester before eventually becoming head tester at Dreyer’s.
This job is quality control, and to test quality, John would test randomly selected batches for quality of more than just flavor.
John has stated he tests with his eyes first, gauging the appearance, before allowing the product to warm up and release its full “topnote, bouquet, and aroma.” Almost sounds like he’s talking about wine, right?
I’ll just let the man speak for himself:
“I start with the white wines of ice cream--vanilla, French vanilla--and work my way up to the Bordeaux of fudge.”
And so comes the tasting. With 20 flavors tested every day and three samples of each (from the beginning, middle, and end of the run), John would taste 60 separate ice creams throughout the day.
Keeping his palate fresh with lukewarm water and unsalted crackers, he used a gold-plated spoon, to avoid the slight aftertaste that would accompany a wood or plastic spoon.
Now, have you never noticed an aftertaste with non-gold spoons? Well then, there’s a reason that John’s taste buds were at one point insured for a million dollars. For his part, John has stated that his taste buds aren’t special in any way, they’ve just been trained (allegedly to the point where he could tell the difference between 12-percent and 11.5-percent butterfat ice creams).
But as you might expect, keeping the integrity of his palate required diligence. No harsh foods like onions in his diet. And further, he was disciplined enough to not actually eat the ice cream he was testing, just holding it and rolling it around in his mouth to gauge the quality.
Look, this could go on and on, and I probably wouldn’t stumble over any revelations or mention any facts you couldn’t get elsewhere (but if you want further reading, I’ll throw some links below).
What I really want to leave you with is a man who is clearly at the top of his game, who clearly loves what he does, and who knows how to hit that punch line.
Here’s hoping this video stays alive.
Additional Reading:
https://www.cookinglight.com/cooking-101/meet-the-chef/the-man-with-the-million-dollar-taste-buds
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-07-22-fi-264-story.html
