We consult culinary professionals around the world
We stick to one specialty: helping you make the best product possible.
Our most in-demand expertise is developing ice cream formulas for artisanal shops and pastry kitchens.
We solve problems, improve quality, adapt formulas for specific challenges, and offer customized versions of ideas from our blog.
There are many consultants who will advise you on business plans, equipment maintenance, financing, hiring. If you’re looking for these services, we can help point you to someone. If you’re trying to make world-class ice cream, you’re in the right place.
Why we’re unique:
This chocolate ice cream recipe is published by a prominent consultancy.
- It’s made with a generic, unspecified commercial ice cream base.
- It’s flavored with standard commercial cocoa powder and extract.
- The only affordance made for the cocoa is added table sugar. There is no compensation for the added fats and solids.
- The Underbelly formula is custom-made around the chocolate; it doesn’t use a one-size-fits-all base.
- It’s egg-free, as chocolate formulas should be.
- It uses blends of sugars, dairy and stabilizers specifically designed for the textural challenges of cocoa butter.
- It’s calculated precisely to maximize both texture and vibrant flavor release.
- It pushes the limits of reasonable chocolate concentration in ice cream.
- We perfected this formula during 15 trials, using the best single-origin chocolates and cocoas available.
This formula represents our vision of perfection. We share it freely. What we offer as consultants is a scientific process to bring YOUR vision to perfection.
If you’re thinking that not every market can support this level of ice cream (or this level of anything), you’re absolutely right. Our approach is designed primarily for chefs at the kinds of restaurant where the wine list pays the bills. Nevertheless, our clients have often been ice cream shops who insist on making their product by hand, constructing recipes on a per-flavor basis for customers seeking something special.
We’re available for big and small projects, and would love to hear from you.
Our clients include
- A dairy farm in Killarney, Ireland, that needed to formulate farm stand ice cream from its own milk and cream
- An artisanal scoop shop in Kuwait City that needed to improve its ice cream quality
- A pastry chef in Kansas who needed help with an artisanal soft-serve base
- An ice cream manufacturer in Hawaii that wanted to launch a non-dairy line
- A national manufacturer that wanted to introduce an innovative new line of non-dairy and all-natural frozen desserts
- A liquid nitrogen-based ice cream shop in New York that needed high-quality recipes created from scratch
- An artisanal scoop shop in Tblisi, Georgia, that needed help with its all-natural base formula
- A high-end restaurant in Brașov, Romania that needed help with its frozen dessert quality
- An artisanal scoop shop in San Francisco, that needed to reformulate its base recipe when its favorite stabilizer was discontinued
- An artisanal scoop shop in Portland, Oregon, that needed help with an oat-based non-dairy ice cream base
- An event-based artisanal ice cream popup in northern Massachusetts that needed help with its ice cream bases
- An artisanal ice cream startup in the United Arab Emirates that needed custom base recipes with unusual ingredient restrictions
- A soft-serve shop in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada that wanted to transition from a commercial mix to artisanal in-house production
I highly recommend Underbelly’s consulting services! Before I’ve opened my ice cream shop I finished courses in Italy and the US. The courses were great and they gave me a lot of theoretical knowledge but when I was back I’ve realized that theory is not enough to make ice cream. I tried my best for weeks but something went wrong. That was when I came across with Underbelly’s blog and contacted them. Tons of helpful information, advice on recipe balancing, igredients and flavors, new ideas and what’s more important – huge support. I can hardly express how grateful I am and what a big role this support and consulting played in my business! Thank you so much and all the best.
—Nata Shchinska
The Cone Culture, Tbilisi, Georgia
Where does our expertise come from, and how do we apply it?
After exhausting all the widely available ice cream knowledge, we worked with top pastry chefs to learn their insights. We then moved on to the professional literature, and then to the peer-reviewed food science literature. To solve some of the remaining mysteries, we talked to the world’s top ice cream science luminaries, including Dr. Cesar Vega, Dr. Douglas Goff, and Dr. Michael Mullan. When questions remained, we did our own experiments.
There can be a long path between theory and practice, especially in such a technically complex product. We made it navigable by encoding our knowledge (including pages of mind-numbing equations) into custom software. There’s plenty of commercially available software for calculating ice cream recipes, but none of it encoded all the knowledge we’d been uncovering. So we put on our math and coding hats and went to work.
In the time it used to take us to calculate a single formula by hand, we can now work through dozens of iterations. We can can quickly build a unique recipe with the exact qualities you want.
We’ve had request like, “We want a dense texture like Ben & Jerry’s, but with a smoother, longer melt, and a less oily mouth feel. We have gum arabic and guar, but no locust bean gum or carrageenan. Also, we can only get goat milk.” We’re happy to work with this! We probably won’t get it perfect with the first draft, but we will get very close. And we know how to use your feedback to get closer.
What are our services?
- Our most popular service is creating a custom artisanal ice cream base recipe. Our goal is to realize your personal vision, while accommodating all of your constraints.
We’ll start with a phone call to discuss your project (always free). If our services feel like a good fit, we’ll ask you to send lots of information, including: your current base recipe; all the things you like about it; all the things you want improved; all the specific qualities you seek; all the constraints (e.g., “no dairy,” or “we can’t get lambda carrageenan in my country,” or “food costs need to stay below $xx/gallon,” or “we’re a goat farm and all our ice cream needs to be made from our own milk.”)
Many clients will have us develop a few base recipes, so they’ll have custom version for different categories of flavors. This is often the best approach, offering the advantages of customized bases, with the efficiency provided by some standardization. A typical portfolio would include 1) standard base; 2) chocolate base; 3) fruit base; 4) alcohol base.
- Our second most popular service is creating an individual flavor recipe after we’ve perfected the base. Most clients like to develop their own flavors, but occasionally, a flavor idea will resist their best efforts. Examples include a client who struggled with using fresh Alphonso mangoes (it turns out they contain an enzyme that attacks milk proteins); and a client who needed a selection of Guiness Stout-based recipes for an event co-sponsored by the Irish brewer. This is usually a less expensive service than creating a base.
- Finally, we’re available for à la carte consulting. If you have a special project, and we’re able to help, we’ll work something out.
How do we begin?
Email us. We’ll set up a call. We never charge for this; we’re happy to talk with our brothers and sisters of the icy depths, even if we don’t end up working together.