On a sunny summer afternoon, David J. Dzurec slipped behind the counter of the UConn Dairy Bar ice-cream parlor and, as he often does when he has a free moment, sneaked a few heaping spoonfuls from among the 24 flavors that the scoopers were dishing out that day.
“Quality control,” he said with a wink, savoring the last of the three, a delectable strawberries and cream.
In Mr. Dzurec’s case, the taste testing is a vaguely plausible excuse. The serving freezer can be a bit finicky, he insists, and as manager of creamery operations here, regularly checking on the consistency of the ice cream inside is one way of being absolutely, positively sure it hasn’t gone on the blink.
Oh, the hardships we endure for our jobs.
Actually, the task of making 25,000 gallons of premium ice cream a year from scratch isn’t all sweetness and light, at least not at this creamery, which is attached to the rear of the Dairy Bar. Refurbished and expanded in the late 1990s, the creamery is still far less automated than most commercial ice-cream plants, and even less so than some other university-run ones. (About 20 colleges run their own ice-cream plants, with some, like Pennsylvania State University, producing 10 times as much as UConn does.)
“This is a very rudimentary system,” said Mr. Dzurec later, bending to help his two co-workers clamp a hose to a valve at the base of a 400-gallon stainless-steel tank. Soon they would pump fresh milk into the tank to make the day’s batch of ice-cream mix. (Mix, for the uninitiated, is the basis for the ice cream. For all but the chocolate-based ice creams, Mr. Dzurec makes mix in just one variety — “white” — and flavors it later with things like chocolate chunks, frozen peaches, and Oreo cookies, after its initial freeze.)
The first task of the day was the milk run, a quick spin up the nearby hill to the university’s barn, where dairy-science students had already milked the university’s herd of Holsteins and Jerseys, leaving Mr. Dzurec and his two colleagues the less odoriferous task of “milking” the 7,200-gallon tank with a hose and pump. He let his new assistant plant manager, Bill Sciturro, scamper up the ladder of the giant milk tank to read the dipstick to be sure they’d gotten the 200 gallons they needed. “It’s like changing the oil on a really big car,” said Mr. Sciturro, from atop the tank.
Back at the plant less than a half-hour later, with the milk still gently sloshing around in a plastic bladder, the ice-cream making began.
Well, not quite right away. As Mr. Sciturro and a summer employee, Tom Sullivan, tried to attach the hose to the pasteurizer vat, a clamp came loose, shooting a few quarts of milk onto the floor before they could grab an oversized wrench and reattach the clamp.
No one blinked, much less cried, over the spilled milk. Mr. Dzurec just reached for a hose and sprayed down the mess. It was a task he and the others would do several more times that morning.
“You spend more time setting up, cleaning, and sanitizing” than anything else, said Mr. Dzurec, water and milk dripping over his rubber boots.
Next into the vat: “our powders,” 600 pounds of sugar, 100 pounds of nonfat milk, 100 pounds of dried corn syrup, and 12 pounds of stabilizer, all stacked solidly in 50-pound bags on a wheeled pallet. The three emptied each bag by hand, as the color of the milk in the vat turned a deeper shade of cream.
The milk is part of the magic of UConn’s ice cream, says Mr. Dzurec, who is also an associate professor of food processing: “Nobody will use fresher milk.” He also believes his slower-than-usual technique for pasteurization — 160 degrees for 30 minutes — does something to the chemistry of the mix to “keep the ice crystals small,” one of several hallmarks of a premium ice cream.
But before the tank began to pasteurize the mix, there was still one more ingredient to be added, the heavy cream, all 150 gallons of it, which the men passed, hoisted, and dumped into the top of the tank, five gallons at a time.
Neither the drudgery nor the heavy lifting fazed either assistant. Mr. Sciturro joined the creamery in June, after 15 years as a counselor to teenage drug addicts. He wants to learn the process so he can eventually run his own store selling homemade ice cream. “This is the antithesis of residential, adolescent drug treatment,” he says. “It’s a happy business.”
For Mr. Dzurec, who has worked on and off in the dairy business for a number of years — between various counseling and academic posts at UConn and other colleges — managing this land-grant university’s 100-year-old tradition of making ice cream is an opportunity to put his own exacting ideas about ice cream into practice.
For one, he believes that ice cream is not a low-fat product. “Ours is 15-percent fat,” he says. Reduced-fat ice cream is about 6-percent fat; regular supermarket brands run about 10 percent.
“There are people who call 12-percent ice cream premium,’ but I wouldn’t,” says Mr. Dzurec, who, it must be acknowledged, has the husky build of a man who’s enjoyed a few ice-cream cones in his 58 years. (He says he actually prefers frozen custard, the confection made with egg yolks.)
He also takes pride in the quality of his ice-cream “inclusions,” the fruits, syrups, and mix-ins that will give the white mix its variety after it shoots through a maze of stainless-steel pipes that lead from the pasteurizer to the homogenizer, where 2,000 pounds of pressure per square inch break up the fat globules.
By the time the ice cream is finished, the mix has been chilled from 160 degrees to 45 degrees in a heat exchanger, chilled again overnight to 32 degrees in a freezing tank, pumped through the 150-gallon “flavor tank” and, for flavors involving solid mix-ins like frozen peaches or nuts, pumped through an ingredient feeder.
The final stage is the freezer, a machine designed to chill the mix to 23 degrees and then pump it out for packing in the three-gallon cardboard barrels that sit in that finicky freezer, or the colorful half-gallon cartons, which feature a drawing of the mascot husky dog, Jonathan, and the university’s dairy barn.
Most of the ice cream produced here at the plant is sold out front at the Dairy Bar. Along with ice cream, it also sells yogurt and, since December, three kinds of cheese, all made on the premises. Small cones cost $2.75 (without toppings), and the half-gallons cost $6 each.
The Dairy Bar is open every day except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, and in the fall and winter, seasonal flavors like pumpkin and peppermint stick are big.
On this summer Monday, a line that ran 20 deep was an apparent testament to the quality of the ingredients — and the ice-cream makers’ efforts. For many, the Dairy Bar is a family tradition. “When I was pregnant, I came a lot,” said Nancy Brobert, a 1970 graduate who lives nearby and is a retired teacher. “Now,” she said, looking over at the five youngsters sitting with her, each with various flavors of ice cream dribbling down their chins and shirts, “it’s nice to bring the grandchildren.”
She, the grandkids, and her two sons-in-law raved about the ice cream. And truly, their smiles left little reason to doubt them. But as a reporter who knows the importance of checking her facts, it seemed only right, as Mr. Dzurec does, to go the extra mile for my job.
Of the 24 flavors on sale that day — yes, I tried each one — the chocolate, the chocolate-peanut-butter swirl (made with natural peanut butter), and the black raspberry were standouts. The vanilla and the cherry chocolate chip weren’t half bad either. Mr. Dzurec said he was not surprised the chocolate stood out. He makes it with “almost double the recommended amount” of chocolate, and it has been cited as one of the best chocolates in New England by some magazines.
I was nearly ready to concur but figured it couldn’t hurt to try a full scoop this time, just to be sure. The memory lingers still — the rich taste of “quality control.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Notes From Academe Volume 53, Issue 46, Page A40
