Island Life Magazine Ltd August/September 2006 | Page 40
FARMING
Lavender Farm
All scream for
ice cream...
Helping to keep you cool this summer are some
delicious flavoured ice-creams made locally from
the islands own dairy herds. Island Life’s, Tony
Ridd had the enviable task to find out more…
There can’t be many visitors who come
to the island with out trying at least
one ice-cream on their stay with island
residents enjoying many more.
With over a hundred different flavours on offer
ranging from traditional vanilla or mint-chocchip to lavender and Goo Goo Chocolate there
really is something for everyone.
So, in this ingredient conscious world that we
live in, what goes into making good ice cream…
In the main, ice-cream consists of milk, sugar,
cream, egg yolk with some sort of flavouring
either natural fruit and nuts or artificial flavours.
To convince us what we are eating some may
even contain artificial colourings.
But not all ice-cream producers are the same
and depending on the breed of cow milked, the
process of production and flavourings used will
decide on the final piece of art, and as we know
‘art is in the eye of the beholder’, or in this case
the mouth of the taster.
We now have four ice-cream producers on the
island, all using their own or locally produced
fresh milk and cream. They use real fruit and
nuts for flavours and no colourings.
Calbourne Classics run by Jill Caywood and her
family, based in Shalfleet have been making icecream since 1989. They use the milk from their
own Fresian Holstein pedigree herd and are the
only island based producer to use clotted cream,
a cooking process of the cream that caramelises
sugar in the milk. They offer 14 flavours and
regularly make bespoke flavours for special
occasions.
Chale Farm Ice Cream owned by the Dyer
family originally using from Coppid Hall Dairy
at Havenstreet. They produce nearly 40 flavours
40
and for the last five years have been making a
very popular diabetic ice cream with the sugar
coming only from the fruit used.
Minghella’s Ice Cream is probably our best
known name on the island and certainly our
longest producer having started in 1950 by
Edward and Gloria Minghella. They are very
particular with their ingredients using only the
freshest full cream milk and double cream from
island farms. There are over a 65 flavours to
choose from, and if you want something a bit
special they