Dorset Taste – Sorbet seems to be the hardest word
John Heighway takes a trip to Salway Ash to visit ice cream makers Baboo Gelato
Published in June ’19
Annie and Sam Hanbury at the Baboo kiosk at Lyme Regis
It is a long way from Singapore to Bridport, but an ice cream parlour in the south-east Asian country has provided the inspiration for one of West Dorset’s most intriguing food producers. When Annie and Sam Hanbury came back from Asia, where they had worked in finance and run their own companies, they found that their new home near Bridport came with a ramshackle but highly productive market garden. There seemed only one thing to do with all those raspberries, apples, pears, medlars, blackcurrants and gooseberries: make ice cream. Lots of ice cream.
‘The garden had been abandoned,’ says Annie. ‘We had to hack our way through bushes in order to pick the raspberries, but they were the most amazing raspberries. They still are. That garden supplies all our raspberries.’
Within months of moving to Dorset with their four children – Ivan, Nikolai, Tintin and Katya – Annie enrolled at the Gelato University in Bologna and learned the science of ice cream making from master gelatieres. Back in Dorset, she spent a year perfecting recipes and in 2016 Baboo Gelato began trading. It now has kiosks at West Bay and Lyme Regis and is available through a network of 70-odd delicatessens, farm shops and restaurants. As flavours go, Baboo is very much of the moment.
‘We have found the Dorset food community very welcoming and incredibly supportive of one another,’ enthuses Annie. ‘There is room for lots of different traders each doing things their own way and people quite genuinely help each other out. There’s a real energy about the Dorset food scene and I’m sure it’s because it’s isolated from London – people don’t come here and then go to work in London, but we all have to make a living so why not look to the amazing resources we have here: the land, the fruit, dairy, veg and so on?’
Baboo – the name is a tribute to Annie’s Russian grandmother who taught her to cook (‘babushka’ is grandmother in Russian) – has a string of regional food awards to its name and a repertoire of 31 flavours with more on the way. As well as gelato, there is a range of sorbets, coated, rippled and layered lollies and four flavours of ‘baboos’ – balls of ice cream (coconut, salted caramel) or sorbet (raspberry, passion fruit) hand-dipped in dark chocolate.
The Plum Sorbet was one of three finalists in the 2018 Taste of the West, in which Baboo won eight awards including three golds. Baboo also won eight stars from Great Taste, including three two-star awards for the Pear Sorbet, Plum Sorbet and Peanut Choc Gelato. In addition, Annie was shortlisted for the 2018 Great British Entrepreneur of the Year.
Annie’s recipes are meticulously recorded on spreadsheets so that every one can be made the same way every time. Ice cream making is a precision business, it seems. It is not like cooking where you can add a bit of this or a little of that; when you make ice cream everything has to be in balance. You have to blend water, sugar, fat and protein to make the actual ice cream – too much fat and it will freeze too hard, too much sugar and it will be too soft – but also in the flavouring as a little more of one thing will affect the taste of another. ‘It’s a very scientific process,’ says Annie.
For example, authentic Italian gelato is served slightly warmer than traditional ice cream. It is also denser and softer because it does not contain as much air, fat or sugar. Not that anyone at Baboo makes a big fuss about the distinction – it’s all ice cream, after all. They are far more concerned about using local seasonal ingredients. Baboo’s milk comes from an organic herd that is less than ten miles away from the company’s Salway Ash headquarters with its busy kitchen and Annie’s recipe lab. The milk is high in fat so does not need a lot of added cream and the herd’s diet of lush grasses, herbs and flowers gives the milk a richer flavour. Annie recalls: ‘We went for a visit during the height of the summer heat and the farmer had brought the herd under cover and was blowing cold air over the cows – as a measure of how well the animals are looked after, that makes us very happy.’
The same applies to flavourings. ‘This summer we managed to get a thousand kilos of strawberries from the farm at Forde Abbey. Their flavour was superb and we puréed them so they can be kept, but once they’re gone, they’re gone. We don’t use flavour pastes so we don’t guarantee absolute consistency of flavour.’
Neither will Baboo be making a feature of wild and crazy recipe combinations created to challenge customers and generate publicity. A B&B did ask Annie to make egg and bacon ice cream to serve for breakfast but she said ‘no’. However, she formulated a toast and marmalade flavour for them and they have been happy with that. River Cottage asked her to make cardamom ice cream, which worked very well for them, and she wants to perfect a toffee apple flavour for Halloween.
‘I’m also working on a popcorn recipe. I’m about halfway there. And we keep getting asked for bubblegum. I’ve always said I wouldn’t do it because there’s nothing natural about the flavour, but I’ve found I can make that tutti-frutti taste with bananas, oranges and lemons, with beetroot juice to make it pink. Whether kids will accept a bubblegum flavour that’s natural remains to
be seen.’
Testing and tasting is all part of the job for Baboo’s lab team
Puddings, cocktails and customer requests have inspired other recipes, but the Baboo repertoire also includes the intriguing named Flu Buster – a frozen cold remedy perhaps? ‘People used to tell me they didn’t eat ice cream in winter because they had colds or whatever, so Flu Buster is for them. It’s a sorbet made with lemon and orange juice for vitamin C, honey for the throat and a kick of ginger and cayenne to open the airways.’
Future plans include more outlets and bigger premises, but Annie’s vision for Baboo harks back to that place that inspired the whole venture – the Island Creamery ice cream parlour near where the family lived in Singapore. ‘It’s a wonderful place, a real community hub for local people. We used to visit with the children most Sundays on the way back from walks in the park. Kids would go there to do their homework and if they brought their granny, she got a free ice cream. There was always something going on.’
The hope is that Baboo can achieve a similar sense of community and people do come and meet at the kiosks to a certain degree, perhaps more so in the winter when they only open at weekends. Lots of schools and local groups visit the kitchen and lab, and Baboo Gelato sponsor the Lyme Splash Water Polo Championships and a kids’ football team in Bridport. ‘We’re building something here and always looking for ways we can give back to the community.’
www.baboogelato.com
