Vermont's Finest

During my junior and senior years of high school I worked as an ice cream scooper at the Ben & Jerry's in Waterbury, Vermont. For those of you not in the know, the B & J Waterbury location is much, much more than just a scoop shop: it's the one and original Ben & Jerry's factory, too. While I was scooping my heart out, ice cream was being churned, tours were being given, keepsakes were being sold, and (I swear to god I'm not making this up), one lucky dude spent eight hours a day tasting every batch of ice cream to ensure quality.

Ok, so that guy might have had the best job in the world, but the rest of us fared pretty well, too. During the off seasons the scoop shop was much slower and everyone did a little bit of everything. But come summer, it was mayhem and those of us in the scoop shop had a very specific schedules. Scoopers just there for the summer were relegated to the basics mostly. Basics included scooping, naturally, and some other easy tasks like "flipping." A scooper on flipping duty basically reloaded all the freezers. Squeezing in between the scoopers (there were nine windows, which meant nine scoopers to dodge when on flipping duty), you'd check to see if any of the five gallon cartons of ice cream were getting low. A flipper's best role was being a mini-quality assurance guru; we had to taste each new carton to make sure it was top notch before flipping the bottom of the almost-empty onto the top of the new ice cream. Yum.

Another tasty job, and my personal favorite, was making the waffle cones. Every single waffle cone served at the factory was handmade on a basic waffle iron. In order to shape the waffles into cones, we had to grab them off the iron and immediately start folding and rolling while they were still hot enough to be pliable. Fingers were inevitably burned, but I found something wholly satisfying about the whole process.

And as someone there year round, I got some of the more interesting activities, too, some that have proven useful in life and some that just make for a good story. In the marginally useful category falls cake decorating. Each Ben & Jerry's cake was a layer of ice cream, a layer of brownies, followed by another layer of ice cream. Every cake was frosted with whipped cream that we made ourselves in a big ol' mixer set up next to the waffle cone station. You'd do a thin layer of whipped cream on the cake and throw it back in the freezer for a few minutes while you did something else so the cake never melted at all. Once a few layers of whipped cream were on there it was time to start the real decorations (made, disgustingly, out of crisco, sugar, and food coloring); I learned to make flowers of all varieties including those fancy pants roses that are so fun, leaves and vines, various borders, etc. I never got very good at the writing, sadly, so I tried to stick to the more artistic cakes and away from the all the many "Happy Birthday, Blah!" cakes. I ended up really loving cake decorating. I've never been great at traditional 2D art forms like drawing or painting, and I loved creating something that was beautiful and artistic.

Not so useful or artistically challenging were my hours spent as a flavor coach. Flavor coaches were tasked with standing on a stage in front of the zillions of people standing in line waiting for their ice cream in the summers. Our goals were two fold: we should entertain with jokes, attempts at juggling (or actual juggling if you were more skilled than I), audience interaction, and anything else ridiculous you could cook up. Oh, and you got to do it all while wearing a tie-dyed lab coat and top hat! Our second goal was to answer people's questions while they were standing in line for an hour, thus preparing them to make a quick order once they finally got to the front of the line. In theory, this helped the line move more quickly, though I know from my hours at the windows that people inevitably asked the same questions no matter what the flavor coach was doing. What, they always wanted to know, was the difference between vanilla and vanilla bean? Really, I always wanted to tell them, nothing! There are little specks of brown in the vanilla bean to suggest a beaniness. That's it! And seriously, if you're waiting in line for hours to get a scoop of vanilla, you've probably wasted your vacation. Much of it stays with me. To this day, I can rattle off the ingredients in any flavor we had at the scoop shop in those days. The flavor most often asked about was Wavy Gravy. And look, I can still do it: Wavy Gravy is a carmel-, cashew-, brazil-nut based ice cream with a chocolate hazelnut fudge swirl and roasted almonds. Chubby Hubby? Why, it's a vanilla malt ice cream with chocolate covered, peanut butter filled preztels, rippled with peanut butter and chocolate fudge. Cherry Garcia is a sweet cream based ice cream with dark chocolate chunks and bing cherries.

Ok, I've written a novel, and all I've done is tell you the most basic duties of scoop shop culture. I'll see if I can't put some more specific anecdotes to words for next time. More to come!

PS: Thanks for the prompt to write this, Rena. I got a little nostalgic (and hungry) remembering it all!