The Popular Seasoning That Works Wonders On Ice Cream

In the late 1970s, one of the stories goes, a teenager named David Gussin was cleaning the oven in a New York City bagel shop. Some of the standard toppings had dropped off and turned crispy as the bagels baked, and on this particular day, Gussin decided to collect them instead of throwing them out. He told the shop owner they should use them to create the "everything bagel" — and it wasn't long before the idea circulated to bagel shops around the city. Now, many other bagel authorities argue against that claim, insisting that everything bagels were around long before the 1970s, but there's no disputing the cultural force that this baked good's signature seasoning became. The combination of poppy seeds, dried onion and garlic, salt, and sesame seeds has taken its flavor beyond bagels to appear in steak rubs, pasta, dips, bloody Mary cocktails, and tuna salad. But Tyler Malek, co-founder and head ice cream maker of Salt & Straw, told Chowhound that everything seasoning's potential transcends the purely savory.

Back in 2017, Salt & Straw created an everything bagel seasoning ice cream that blended the salty and sweet flavors into something delightfully unexpected. (It might even be one of the 85 recipes in the brand's "America's Most Iconic Ice Creams Cookbook.") The richness of a creamy base meets the seasoning's bright, bold flavors and creates a delicious complexity. At this point, the skeptics might raise an eyebrow or two — the nutty sweetness of sesame and poppy seeds could work on ice cream, sure, but garlic and onion? The short answer is that yes, even those alliums elevate the ice cream's flavor, but the long answer includes a word of caution from Malek.

When topping your ice cream with everything seasoning, you have to stay mindful of those bolder ingredients. Even when frozen, the flavors of garlic and onion usually remain intense, and Tyler Malek has found that those alliums get stronger in ice cream. "Garlic and onion in particular ... are horrific when they freeze — they bloom a ton in ice cream," he told Chowhound.

So when Salt & Straw created its everything bagel seasoning ice cream, Malek had to take those qualities into account to create the balance that any sweet-savory ice cream needs. "We made our own everything bagel seasoning from scratch in our kitchen, which allowed us to edit out some of those harsher flavors and play up some of the fruitier, more decadent spices that blend much better in cream and sugar," he said. The flavor editing that Malek suggests can't really happen if you're just using a jar of everything seasoning from the store, so you'll get better results if you mix the dried garlic, onion, poppy seeds, salt, and sesame seeds in your own kitchen (you can even recreate Trader Joe's beloved Everything But the Bagel Seasoning). The particular ice cream you use matters, too — those flavors might clash if you try adding them to a vanilla ice cream, but they could be heaven on a cheese-infused ice cream.

The same made-from-scratch principle will apply if you're planning to branch out from the everything bagel seasoning and try other unexpected savory ice cream toppings. Making those seasonings yourself allows for more control over the harmonious blend of flavors and, thus, gives you better results. "All kinds of seasonings work really great, but again, you have to be conscious of the types of seasonings you're using," Salt & Straw's Tyler Malek told Chowhound. "We like to avoid pre-made seasoning blends straight off the shelf because they don't have the balance of flavors that you need in ice cream."

If you're willing to put in that extra bit of homemade experimentation, a whole new world of ice cream toppings will open up — savory, spicy, acidic, even bitter to give sweet ice cream some depth. Salt & Straw makes its own garam masala spice, chili crisp, and mole to accentuate some flavors that work well with ice cream's rich sweetness and minimize those that don't. "Making everything from scratch in you kitchen like we do here at Salt & Straw allows you to have a lot more freedom to be creative with spice," Malek said.