Foodish Ways

The wait is over. Max’s Best Ice Cream is open! This Downtown Bethesda ice cream shop is where fun treats meet doing good for the community with Best Buddies International. Read my previous blog post to learn more about the owner, Cory Alexander, and this venture with Best Buddies. Learn more about Best Buddies International on their website.

Note: This interview took place during the summer, so the menu items mentioned may no longer be available.

Max’s Best Ice Cream is family-operated and serves farm-fresh ice cream from Vanderwende Farm Creamery. Vanderwende’s is a multi-generational family-owned and operated dairy company based in Delaware. Max’s Best Ice Cream also sources ingredients from local artisans. This dine-in ice cream shop’s menu includes scoops of ice cream and signature offerings. The signature items include extreme milkshakes, boozy shakes, sundaes, reinvented floats and a custom frozen hot chocolate blend. Check out my full review of Max’s Best Ice Cream.

The wonderful people at Max’s Best Ice Cream invited me to try a couple of the menu items and to interview the innovative pastry chef behind the menu, Dana Cree.

Pastry Chef, Dana Cree

Dana Cree is a professional ice cream maker based in Chicago, Illinois. She has specifically worked in the frozen desserts space for 25 years. She has earned the Jean Banchet award for Best Pastry Chef for her work at Blackbird restaurant in Chicago and multiple James Beard Award nominations. Cree also has a cookbook titled Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream: the Art and Science of the Scoop, which won an IACP book award. In 2018, she opened Pretty Cool Ice Cream in Chicago, a company that manufactures ice cream and other frozen desserts. Her company has worked with brands like Porsche and celebrities like Drew Barrymore. Let’s dive into our interview!

What inspired you to become a professional ice cream maker?

Where do we even begin? I was a pastry chef for 20 years, and ice cream was one of my favorite things to make. It always felt like a magic trick. You put a mixture of cream and sugar and maybe fresh strawberries into a machine, and ice cream comes out on the other side. And it’s also one of the most scientific foods we eat. It’s a liquid, a solid, and a gas at the same time, and getting all three states of matter to lay nicely takes a little bit of doing. So once you start to adjust flavors, like you want to add honey instead of sugar, or you want to use sour cream instead of cream or change the milk, the texture starts to fall apart. So one of the first questions I asked was, why is this happening?

It took me another 10 years to be able to fully answer that question. So it satisfied me intellectually, like my curiosity. And I had worked in some restaurants that did molecular gastronomy and so the science of the kitchen was a huge interest of mine. And then on an emotional level, it’s one of life’s simplest pleasures. I love that we don’t even remember our first taste of ice cream because it usually happens so young, which means it’s always with us. And I just love that it connects everybody across every demographic, across the entire world, in a way that’s so simple and so joyful. It’s such a perfect medium you can make almost any flavor of ice cream.

You worded that very beautifully, where it’s such an early memory for us that it’s just a part of our lives at this point. And I think it’s such a source of joy and a way to connect with people. It feels great to grab a scoop with your friends or with your cousins, or with your parents. It’s a simple way to make such a beautiful and memorable moment. It’s something that I hear a lot about ice cream in particular.

How does your pastry background shape your approach to ice cream? Is there a moment in particular where things clicked for you?

I went into pastries after learning how to cook. I went to culinary school first. One of the restaurants I did an internship at was called the Fat Duck, and it’s in England. They had a course that was a pine dib dab, which is like a pixie stick. And then they had a card on your table that talked about food and nostalgia. I really, really loved the the intellectualization of nostalgia. That was something that’s so intertwined with food for us, that, you know, one taste of something could take you back 40 years. Even the smell of something.

So I would say that from that moment on, I definitely identified nostalgia as one of the main ingredients in my cooking. I really loved to tie in these joyful moments in my youth, and then in times past that maybe were earlier than I was even born. And one of the dishes I did at my very first pastry chef job was a trio of desserts. It was a ding dong, little animal crackers that I made dipped in the pink and white chocolate with the sprinkles, and a scoop of orange and vanilla swirled ice cream. And, you know, it’s just these three very nostalgic flavors but done really well.

I would say that ice cream is so nostalgic, and there are so many nostalgic flavors that come out of ice cream. Mint Chocolate Chip, Rainbow Sherbet, Butter Pecan, that leaning into ice cream as a medium for nostalgia and for flavor was just a very natural progression for me.

I love that. I saw that you had a book. Is that something that also plays into your book and other projects that you’ve done? Do you often lean into nostalgia for many of those things?

Yeah, I would say so. I mean, I have another ice cream company in Chicago. It’s called Pretty Cool Ice Cream, and we specialize in ice cream on a stick. So I dipped and decorated ice cream first. I like to say it’s the modern day Good Humor. One of the flavors that we revamped was the Strawberry Shortcake, which is a Good Humor flavor that people grow up with with a vanilla ice cream covered in strawberry cake bits. And we have a lot of seasonal specials that come through that we will borrow from nostalgic American dessert. We have an orange dreamcicle, which is kind of a given. We did a banana pudding and key lime pie. And then here, there are a handful of people who have are familiar with the Atlantic Beach pie, which is a like a key lime pie, but it’s made with lemon, and they use saltines as the crust.

Wow! I’ve never heard of that. So a salty, sweet combo?

Exactly. So we made the Sweet and Salty Lemon delight. It’s got a piece of, like, lemon cake underneath, vanilla and lemon ice cream, lemon curd, marshmallow sauce, and candied lemon all over it. And then fresh saltines, of course.

What’s the biggest misconception that people have about making ice cream?

I think the biggest misconception about making ice cream is that it’s hard. You do need an ice cream maker, but you also need a coffee pot to make coffee. I don’t know where the stigma around single use machines came from in the kitchen. There are a lot of people who don’t want a machine that can only do one task, so they reject the idea of an ice cream maker. But it makes ice cream, so I think it’s magical. At its core, it’s just cream, milk, and sugar. And that can be a very simple thing to make. The book that I have breaks down the science of ice cream for people who are curious about it and who want to use it to like empower themselves to make better ice cream. If you follow the recipe, it can just guide you through your very first ice cream or frozen yogurt. And then I do put stabilizers in the ice cream in the book. But of course, they’re optional. The recipes will also work without them, but the stabilizers do help create a texture more like what we’re used to getting at an ice cream shop. To get ice cream as creamy as possible, you need to get it cold as fast as possible. The ice cream makers we use at home just don’t go very fast, so the professional ice cream makers can make ice cream in five minutes. The ones at home are like 30 to 40 minutes. So the longer you turn it and the slower you cool it, the bigger the ice crystals are. The stabilizers help keep the ice crystals smaller. Once you have turned the ice cream, you want to harden it as fast as possible. So we have blast chillers that are like -20 degrees. But at home, we have home freezers that get open and shut. So, I do describe the use of stabilizers.

I think another misconception is that stabilizers are like poisonous chemicals that people add to food for processing. But a lot of them are as simple as guar gum, which is just the ground seed of the guar plant. Then cornstarch, which is some people are very familiar with, or cream cheese can be used as well. It already has some it already has some gums in it.

I didn’t know this. I can’t say I thought much about that part of ice cream. It sounds like, for the most part, they’re natural things.

Some of them are, yeah. Some of them are a little more derived scientifically. And you use them in such small amounts, or you just don’t put it in at all. It’s up to you.

I think that something to remember at home when you’re making it. You can make it, however you want. In your book, here are some tools to get you started.

What was the process like creating the menu here?

It was really fun. It happened over the winter over Zoom. I got a list of all the flavors from Vanderwende’s, and basically, I was told to be free. I pitched a menu, and we narrowed it down just on the way they sounded. Then I did a tasting for Angela and Cory in Chicago, and they got to see their menu for the first time. I think it was a really exciting moment for everyone.

It’s so important to allow artists of various mediums to have freedom. It’s amazing what you can come up with when people fully trust you, and I think you can see it in the menu that you were fully trusted. You got to explore. I know that everything doesn’t make the menu. I can only imagine what didn’t make it that was also special.

*talking about the Arnold Palmer float I was trying* There are so many gems like this one! This is so beautiful, and it’s good. I get a sense of nostalgia because I grew up drinking Arnold Palmers. It’s lovely to see very playful menu items, and I think that brings a lot of special moments and connections with people.

What are three of your favorite menu items?

I really love the Island Turtle on the boozy shakes. We blend a little bit of coconut into it, and it’s the best coconut I’ve ever had. I love the Home Run Popcorn Sundae. It’s based off Cracker Jack’s. It has a hint of smoked sea salt on the top, which really takes it to another level. Then I really love Max’s Banana Banana Milkshake. It’s a fresh banana milkshake. Cory and Angela sent me a video of Max telling me what he wanted me to make. He said, “I want a Banana Banana Milkshake.” I said, “I’m going to give you a Banana Banana Milkshake,” because he has a banana milkshake every single night. So we made him an over the top Banana Banana Milkshake with a banana dolphin, banana bread, banana slices, banana Pocky, banana marshmallows, banana candies. It’s banana-rific! But I also really love the Fresh Banana Milkshake

Is there a particular element that you enjoy working with the most?

I do really love the float. I think that it just felt like a natural part of the menu to me. I think floats may have fallen out of favor. Again, there’s this nostalgic tie. They’re one of the most ordered parts of our menu. When people come in, they’re genuinely surprised to see so many of them. And I’m so happy.

What items are the most popular so far, other than floats?

The Towering Chocolate Chip Brownie Sundae. It’s a warm brownie sundae with three scoops of ice cream and an entire ice cream sandwich stuck on top of it. It’s really good. Then the Cookie Monster Milkshake. It’s a malted cookie dough milkshake, and it’s just very popular.

Thank you so much for sharing your time with me today! I can’t wait to visit again soon!

Check out Max’s Best Ice Cream in Bethesda, MD! You’ll love all the icre cream treats they have to offer.

Address: 7770 Woodmont Ave, Bethesda, MD 20814

Until next time.

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