Senior whips up winning ice cream flavor

Senior Katie Maloney's coffee-based "All Nighter" ice cream was announced the winner of UDairy Creamery's Blue Hen Flavor Contest at the Homecoming football game on Saturday.

Her creation was selected from more than 300 entries and includes cookie-dough chunks, crushed chocolate sandwich cookies and a fudge swirl.

After deciding to enter the contest, Maloney brainstormed about her university experiences for inspiration, and landed on her late-night study sessions.

"I thought about what me and my friends snack on when we are pulling all-nighters," Maloney, a biology major, said.

The university-wide contest, open to students, faculty, staff and alumni, began in early September.

Dairy and food science manager of the creamery, junior Teresa Brodeur, said the contest helped raise awareness about the creamery.

"I think it definitely worked," Brodeur said. "I have friends that I would tell that I worked there and they would [say], ‘I don't even know where that is.'"

After the staff narrowed the competition down to eight finalists on Sept. 21, they began to create the flavors of ice cream. Various taste-testings were held on campus, according to Brodeur, and a total of 3,096 votes narrowed the flavors from eight to four, down to two and then ended in "All Nighter's" victory.

These final flavors included "UDe Leche," which is caramel ice cream with crushed Nilla wafers, and "First State Cobbler," a peach ice cream with a blueberry swirl and crumb topping.

According to Brodeur, creating the eight final flavors was simple because the base for each was a standard flavor the creamery regularly produces.

"For ‘Cookies And Cream,' we know how much cookies we normally have to add, and we just kept that in mind when adding all the different ingredients, instead of just cookies for the ‘All Nighter,'" Brodeur said.

Some flavors were bizarre, including one calling for candies in the form of chicken feet, Brodeur said, while others were as basic as adding Pop Rocks to vanilla ice cream.

Other flavor ideas didn't seem to be serious, including one calling for actual chicken, and another proposing beer-flavored ice cream, said senior Jacob Hunt, assistant manager at the creamery.

All of the accepted flavors were made using a similar process, which Brodeur explained in three steps.

The creamery sends their milk via High Point Dairy to Cumberland Dairy in New Jersey to be pasteurized and homogenized, which turns it into a base product that contains only the natural sugars that are in milk.

"It's basically a milk form that is much more stable," Brodeur said. "It can last for about a month or two."

The unflavored base product is then poured into a batch freezer where other ingredients are mixed in, such as vanilla extract, cheesecake or mint flavoring.

Variegates, also called swirls, are added to the batch freezer at this time. Variegates include ingredients like chocolate chips, graham crackers or in the case of "All Nighter," fudge.

At approximately 24 degrees Fahrenheit, the batch freezer produces an ice cream that is more crystallized than its milk base, but does not have the consistency of the final product.   

This milk base is then frozen in the blast freezer, which is normally kept between -25 and -30 degrees Fahrenheit, completing the process.

While Maloney said she thought that a more "UD-related flavor" would win, she thinks students could relate to her creation. Both "UDe Leche" and "First State Cobbler" are currently sold at the creamery.

"I thought it would be fun to have my legacy at UD be an ice cream flavor," she said.