Super Secret Ice Cream in Bethlehem, NH

Kristina Zontini, Founder/Co-owner

Origins

I’ve always kind of been one of those people who says, “What will I do when I grow up?” I did a lot of food nonprofit work and managing farmers’ markets. Then I studied food systems, but I never imagined I would have a career in food. I moved to Northern New Hampshire where my husband is from. I was a marketing director for a food co-op, but got burned out and wanted something creative. I started baking sourdough bread just for fun before the pandemic. And then on a trip to Chicago, I went to Pretty Cool Ice Cream, which is owned by Dana Cree. She had this beautiful blue cookbook, and I got home and started making ice cream from Hello My Name is Ice Cream. I really enjoyed the fact that I could use ingredients from the farms in our community.

I have a ski-tuning shed behind my house, so I put a chest freezer in there and after the pandemic hit, it became a fun thing for people to pick up ice cream in this little hidden spot in the woods. I sold it at the farmers’ market for two years. And then a building came up for sale on Main Street and we thought, every small town needs an ice cream shop, so I just decided to go all in in the summer of 2022. I thought we would rent 75% of the building and I would have 25% to have a little ice cream business a few days a week, but that was very naive of me. Now we use the whole building and we’re open every day.

We’ve been really flattered by the attention we’ve gotten. This is our third time being James Beard semifinalists and our second time being on the shortlist. We’re really proud because I think ice cream is really a great way to tell the story of craftsmanship and your local community. It’s often overlooked as a craft because there are all different ways you can make ice cream.

Company Mission

We’ve created a really warm and welcoming space in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, with a wonderful community of farmers and visitors from all over. It’s kind of this little hidden nook, which is cool.

From the very beginning we’ve been very stubborn about how we want to make ice cream. We get all local milk and cream down the road and we’re creating our own ice cream bases for every flavor. Everything is fresh. We have three or four different recipes for different types of strawberry ice cream where we’re controlling the amount of sugar and the amount of berries. There’s nothing artificial. We’re not bumping up the flavor with strawberry-flavored syrup or anything like that. If we’re making a strawberry flavor, it’s because the strawberries are local and in-season. We’re not making something that’s overly sweet or icy.

Signature Products

Everyone always talks about our honeycomb ice cream, and it’s the only flavor we’ve continued to make from the very beginning that I made up when I was selling at the farmers’ markets. We use local honey to make honeycomb candy and we crush it up and swirl it in the ice cream.

My favorite is called Rhubarb Almond Crunch. That one’s really special because our growing season is pretty short here. As soon as Sam comes knocking on our door from Meadowstone Farm, he says, “I have the rhubarb.” We are so excited because it means we made it through the winter and summer is starting. The scoopers are coming back for the season. We make a rhubarb flavor with sweet cream ice cream and this really nice tart rhubarb jam that has a little bit of a secret ingredient with some elderflower liqueur in it and then this buttery almond crunch that’s made with crushed almonds, lots of brown butter, and a little bit of Maine grain oats that you can’t stop eating. Alex, who is now a co-owner, made that when she started a few years ago.

In the winter, there’s not as much local stuff, so we try to source exciting ingredients that we think are really cool. We get these nice Hawaiian vanilla beans from a small farm in Hawaii. And we’re always trying to find different types of single-origin chocolate that have different flavor profiles so people can try different chocolate ice cream and see the difference.

We use wild Timur pepper from Burlap and Barrel. They’re a spice company. They have peppers from Nepal in the Himalayas that are part of the Sichuan pepper family. The tasting notes are grapefruit, hemp and tongue tingle. So we steep the ice cream with this wild smear pepper, and it tastes like we put grapefruit in the ice cream. It’s a fun, funky, bright flavor, and then you get a little bit of tongue tingle. A lot of people don’t want to try it. Then they taste it and it tastes great. That’s a fun one.

We also have this amazing cantaloupe sorbet. I think a lot of times people think they don’t like cantaloupe, but they’ve never had a really good in-season cantaloupe. To make a sorbet from that is just such a treat in the summer.

Equipment ‘Must-Haves’

We just got a brand new ice cream pasteurizer that’s a little bit bigger and it’s saving everyone’s backs. We’re not in pain when we go home anymore from mixing gallons and gallons of ice cream mix.

Production Tips

It’s our prepping system, kind of like mis en place. We have a lot of systems in place, so when we come in in the morning, we know what we have to do. Our pints are already stamped and labeled and ready to go.

Secrets of Success

Have fun and treat your team well. Make it a wonderful place to work. Year-round, we have probably eight or nine full-time people. In summer, it balloons to about 30 with a bunch of part-timers.

And stick to what you believe in. Early on, a lot of people told us we couldn’t make ice cream the way we wanted to. I was crazy for wanting to make our own ice cream bases and use local ingredients, but we proved we could do it. If there’s something you’re passionate about, just stick with it.

Future Plans

We’re not interested in wholesale or becoming a multi-shop location. We just finished construction this past winter, and we’ve been expanding so quickly in our current footprint. We’re already open later and we keep making the experience at our shop better. We’re down in the winter and up in the summer, and we want to expand our reach during the summer without sacrificing quality. Maybe doing some fun pop-ups in different areas where customers can reach us because so many people say they have to drive to reach us.

We want to find ways to introduce new ingredients, make our seating better, find more ways to help our community. What other chocolates can we find? What boundaries can we push with how we make our sorbets? I want to look more into our non-dairy lines of flavors. We’re really focusing on making the experience better and better for this one shop.

Photos courtesy of Super Secret Ice Cream

For more info, visit www.instagram.com/supersecreticecream

(This article appeared in the Summer 32 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)