Kevin Liu puts tea leaves from Asia in ice cream to make it taste different
A Vancouver-based ice cream maker is making tea-based ice creams that taste like things like rare Korean oolong, freshly picked Shincha leaves from Japan, and even Chinese herbal cough syrup. These tea-based ice creams are a little different from the usual chocolate or vanilla.
Kevin (Kebs) Liu, the owner of Kebs Makes Ice Cream, said, “A lot of the ice cream shops I go to don’t have the flavors I want.”
Liu says he couldn’t find what he was looking for, so he made up his own tastes.But it turned out to be a tough battle to get them into ice creams.
Liu said, “I kept failing, and that became a challenge, and I really wanted to make it work.”
Liu says that after several failures, he decided to look to Asia for ideas.
“The idea of putting tea in ice cream came from my travels in Asia,” he said. “They have a lot of tea-themed items, drinks, and food, and something about that made my taste buds explode.
Even though tea-based flavors like London Fog are very popular, a tea expert and food and beverage consultant in Vancouver named Gregory Lui says they are still pretty rare in the West.
“Coffee ice cream is easy to find, but exotic tea ice cream is much harder to find,” he said.
Liu has been a chef for a long time, but he didn’t know much about tea. So he went to O5 Rare Tea + Kombucha Bar in Kitsilano, which sells artisanal teas from all over the world, for help.
He said, “People at O5 are very knowledgeable about tea, and a lot of my flavors are based on what they suggest.”
The tea leaves at O5 come from remote farms in Bhutan, Nepal’s Himalayas, and India’s northeast, but Geoff Sugiyama, the manager of O5, says they don’t want to be too picky about their teas.
“Yes, the teas are rare, but if someone wants to make great ice creams or cakes, we are excited to see new ways to extract and infuse tea,” he said.
Finding the right mix of ingredients
The Chiran Shincha is one of the most popular flavors of ice cream at Kebs. Shincha, which means “new leaves” in Japanese, is the first spring tea harvest. According to Sugiyama, the O5 gets their Shincha from the Chiran region in Kagoshima, which is on the island of Kyushu in Japan.
Another popular tea is Korean oolong, which is made from fermented tea leaves from South Korea’s Gyeongsangnam province. It tastes like chocolate, charred oak, and buckwheat honey.
Lui says that both Korean oolong and Shincha are hard to find and not widely sold in the North American market.
A flavor of ice cream that tastes like cough syrup is even rarer.
Liu says that when he was a child, he liked the taste of Pei Pa Koa, a Chinese herbal formula cough syrup, so much that he would cough on purpose so his mother would give him a spoonful. Other kids his age didn’t like the cough syrup as much, so their moms put Pei Pa Kao in milk. This gave Liu the idea to do the same thing, but with ice cream.
“Ice cream is mostly milk, so I thought it would be a good idea to mix it with Pei Pa Kao.”
Lui says that crafted ice cream makers like Kebs have started to appeal to people with more mature tastes by making flavors that are unique and complex.
“Their ice cream isn’t anything special, but that’s because these products are common in Asia. He said, “They are unique, right on time, and in style in Western Canada.”
Liu says that when the time comes, there will be more unique flavors.
He said, “It means a lot to me that I can use these less-well-known ingredients to make something tasty.”