Lick this Icecream Parlour 4.25

Opened in January 2005 - we specialise in Ice Cream, Sorbet and Gelato. There are normally 43 flavours on offer at any one time. We hand-make our own Gelato and Sorbet on site using a traditional 3 day method following our own unique recipes. Real Kiwi "Ice Cream" using local ingredients.

We hand-make the Gelato Ice Cream and Sorbets you see displayed at Lick this! using our own recipes. We use natural ingredients and local fruit where we can eg Strawberry and Feijoa. We only use the best quality ingredients.

We have developed our recipes to suit Kiwi tastes and created typical Kiwi flavours. More oh (Moro Bar), Mint Choc chip, Gingernut, Pineapple Lump, Hokey Pokey etc – no one else knows our recipes, they are not available anywhere else – they are totally unique to Lick this!

We don’t add any preservatives to make our Ice cream last longer so we only make it when we need it – we don’t carry excess stock – it is all freshly made.

Making good Ice Cream and Sorbet is a mixture of Science and Art. It is a 3-day process which involves -

1. Day one - making the Custard then ageing it overnight
2. Day two – Mixing each flavour individually, Batch churning it and then Blast Freezing
Day three – decorating and placing out for serving

Our method
We make Ice cream the “traditional” way because we want to make the best quality product we can possibly can.

Day 1 - We make the white “Ice Cream Custard” the mixture of milk, cream, sugars and natural Gums that act as Emulsifiers and Stabilisers are heated up to 85C to cook the mixture and pasteurise it. At the bottom of the machine is a device that homogenisers the mix to make it taste much better. We then leave the “custard’ to age overnight. At this stage it tastes a bit like Sweetened Condensed Milk or a thin Vanilla Custard.

Day 2 – Churning day, we add the flavours, ripples and fruits etc to the white custard base to create the Ice Creams we need that day. We can only make 1 tin (5 litres) at a time. As the Ice cream comes out of the churn we add any solid additions – things like crushed Cookies, Hokey Pokey bits, Raisins or nuts. We then blast freeze (freeze very quickly) the finished Ice Cream. This makes it taste very smooth. We then leave the Ice cream to harden and flavour up overnight.

It takes 1 person all day to make 25 to 30 tins. You can take short cuts in this process but your finished product will never be as good – we believe you can taste the difference.

Chocolate Ice Cream
Good Chocolate Ice Cream is the hardest to make – we make ours using 2 different Cocoa’s, milk, cream, natural gums, sugars and Whittaker’s Dark Chocolate Bars. This mixture is cooked up in the pasteuriser like the white base, to form a Chocolate custard which is aged and churned the next day as normal. Our intention is to make a chocolate that tastes like Milk Chocolate Bars rather than the Cocoa Hot Chocolate taste. We are very proud of it – we only make 9 tins in a batch on Chocolate Ice cream day.

Sorbet
We have worked particularly hard on our Sorbet recipes – Sorbet’s are more than 50% fruit and don’t contain any dairy. They are completely natural and only contain fruit, some sugar to stop them freezing solid and natural gums. The base mix is made on day 1 – this is aged overnight and unsweetened fruit is added on Day 2 just before churning – it is then Blast Frozen. Good sorbets are tricky to make and need to be eaten within a few days of being made. Great sorbets flavours are Passionfruit, Lemon, Forest Berry (Strawberry, Boysenberry and Raspberry) and Feijoa. We sometimes make Chocolate Sorbet which is becoming a favourite for Lactose intolerant people.

Our Flavours
We are particularly proud of what we do. Developing our recipes over the last 13 years has involved some trial and error – when we create a new flavour we initially only make one tin (5 Litres) of it and put it out to sell. We only make it again if we get good feedback and it sells quickly.

Flavours that we consider standouts include Coconut Bounty, Peanut Butter Choc Chip, Moro Oh, Pineapple Lump, Salted Caramel and Gingernut. We do make special flavours for particular times of the year – Christmas Cake, Christmas Mince Pie, ANZAC biscuit and Easter Smash to name a few. We have made some usual flavours – “Bacon, banana and maple syrup”, Beetroot sorbet and fresh Fennel sorbet for example.

Following a recipe is only a small part of making a good Ice cream or sorbet. The method is very important as is attention to detail and “love” of what you are doing and creating – we are always striving to make the best Ice Creams we can.

We have discovered that to succeed we have to make flavours our customers like and not just ones we like ourselves. If you have any flavours you think we should make please let us know – we are always open to suggestions.

If you are not sure what to pick you can always ask to try a couple of flavours before you buy.