Farm to table to ice cream cone: Students get creative, invent dream dessert

PORTLAND, Ore. — As the hallway buzzed with lingering sounds of recess — squeaky shoes, racing footsteps, gasps of breath — students walked by Mr. Schrieb’s fifth grade classroom at Chapman Elementary in Northwest Portland and exchanged quizzical looks. What’s up with the coolers stocked with ice cream, they wondered?

Inside, the fifth graders' eyes went wide with wonder, and some let their mouths fall open. They exchanged shocked glances with their classmates.

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The farm-to-table movement is more than just elegant, elevated tasting menus at five star restaurants. Artisan ice cream shops -- which have popped up across the world over the last few years, and are frequently referenced in local travel guides as must-stops -- often tout only-found-in-this-part-of-the-world flavors. And on the West Coast, at least, one of those shops spends every September getting children excited about local ingredients. It's more farm-to-cone than farm-to-table.

When cousins Kim and Tyler Malek started Salt & Straw in Northeast Portland back in 2011, they hoped to create some wacky, weird flavors and give the community a gathering place.

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Salt & Straw, which has shops at six cities up and down the West Coast, prides itself on unconventional pairings, with flavors like Arbequina Olive Oil, Green Apple Mayo Sherbet, Smoked Hefeweizen, Caramel Corn on the Cob and other crazy concoctions. But every fall, they get ideas from a group known for their impossible imaginations: elementary school students.

Adults, as it turns out, can’t quite compete with the brain of a 10-year-old when it comes to dream dessert.

Shortly after school starts, Salt & Straw partners with the elementary school closest to its respective shops, inviting children to submit their dream ice cream flavor. Tyler Malek, Salt & Straw's co-founder and head ice cream maker, likes to think of it as, “mobilizing an army of the most creative thinkers in the country.”

“It’s such a weird divide,” says Tyler Malek, 31. “You’re making caramel with 10-year-olds and you ask them what they could infuse it with and they’re shouting stuff like pizza! Kale! Then you talk to 14-year-olds, and they suggest stuff we see every day — chocolate, lavender. Something happens when you grow up, you don’t think about pairing strange things together.”

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It takes a bunch of kids, he says, to push him off the ice-cream making cliff, challenging him to imagine a test kitchen without limits.

This is more than a farm-to-table movement gone elementary. Yes, Kim Malek, herself a 48-year-old mother of three, wants young people to be excited about fresh, local ingredients. But she takes particular joy in planting seeds that could help children figure out what they want to do when they grow up.

“When you walk into a classroom and say, ‘My job is to make ice cream,’ kids minds are blown,” she says.

So many children put limits on grown-up jobs, Malek says, thinking of careers like teachers, doctors or professional athletes. With Salt & Straw’s student inventor series, kids learn early on about potential careers in food science, hospitality and other creative fields.

Both Tyler and Kim Malek continually marvel at the sophistication of 10-year-old’s pallets — this year’s student series features ingredients like taro, jackfruit and butterfly pea flower. Since expanding into Los Angeles, in particular, Tyler Malek says they've noticed an uptick in health-conscious, alternative ingredients.

The submissions are known to make the test kitchen cooks crack up.

From Angel at Washington Elementary in San Diego: “Ingredients: Sour dough, vanilla, strawberry drizzle, hot fudge, and penuts. Directions: I don’t know.”

Authenticity rules, which is why the Maleks see no reason to correct typos or spelling mistakes. From Ellie at Adams Elementary in Seattle: “In the PB and C is peanut butter ice-cream, ripe sliced bannans, hot fuge and chocklet chips. The choclet chip are in the icecream. My isperashun is my dad loveing peanut butter and bannas together. Also, its poshonul you can put appels instead of bannas.”

Miles at Larchmont Charter in Los Angeles displayed particular confidence in his creation, Pomegranate Pink Panther, a vegan option: “Ingredients: 1 cup bloom fresh pomegranate arils, divided, 2 cups coconut cream, divided, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. as far as ice cream goes, I bet this is the best.”

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The list of inventions that made it into scoop shops in the past include Stop, Guac & Roll, The Kail Creeasheon and Olde People, a flavor inspired by grandfatherly preferences for Werther’s candies. One of the first-ever student inventor flavors, Skittles Rainbow Sherbet, is so popular it comes back every year during Pride Month.

All the proceeds from the student series goes directly back to the schools, allowing kids to see tangible benefits to being creative. Vernon Elementary in Northeast Portland was the first school to participate in the student series seven years ago, and used its proceeds to completely re-do its playground.

Now, fall is one of Kim and Tyler Malek’s favorite times, because after more than 75 tests -- including a few flavor fails, like French Onion Scoop -- they get to share the final product with students. That’s how in early September, when Kim Malek went to debut “I oat you one,” the winning flavor from Izzy and Katharina of Chapman Elementary, she found herself on the end of some very honest feedback.

Originally inspired by “the oat milk trend,” Izzy and Katharina admitted to changing their story for the sake of simplicity: I oat you one, they say now, came from the oatmeal raisin cookie. Izzy says they “took an average flavor and made it unique” by insisting on an addition of cinnamon and nutmeg.

But nothing’s perfect, not even ice cream. While Izzy and Katharina liked how their flavor came to life, they did have one critique: The final version, made by the Maleks, has way too many raisins.

When she heard this, Kim Malek burst out laughing. This is exactly why she loves working with kids. They have no limits, and no filter. It makes for some delicious treats.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Farm to table gets a cool twist as fourth graders invent new flavors