An unusually hot July sun is streaming into Garden Creamery, making the Jolly-Rancher-pink Mission district scoop shop warm and stuffy.
It’s like being hot-boxed inside a big, juicy cantaloupe.
Next to the dipping cabinet (industry speak for the ice cream freezer), Del Bosque Farms cantaloupes are stacked high, the rough, boring-beige rinds belying their orange flesh and sweet, rapturous funk. The aroma is at scratch’n’sniff level, the platonic ideal of a melon that is, too often, picked hard and relegated to the undistinguished company of grapes and bananas.
However, in the hands of Garden Creamery owners Erin Lang and Donny Capozzi, these ripe melons are transformed into some of the city’s best ice cream, selling at a rate of around 3,000 scoops per season. At the end of July, when they announced the flavor’s arrival on Instagram, a dedicated group of their 27,000 followers swooned. It wasn’t exactly Taylor Swift-level, but there were caps, exclamation points, and heart-eye emojis:
“OH.MY.GAHHHHD”
“It’s here! My absolute all-time favorite.”
“Ohhh yumm been waiting for this!!!”
“Best time of the year!”
The cantaloupe isn’t the only flavor that draws crowds — and sometimes long, long lines — to Garden Creamery’s storefront on 20th and Lexington streets. The fans come for both the popular Asian and tropical flavors (haupia, salty kaya and even butter mochi, which Lang promises is making a comeback) and their numerous collaborations, including a recent one for which they made dog ice cream (with cold-pressed peanut butter, of course) and topped it with dog treats from Wilderbites. A frenzy is expected when Honolulu’s popular Asato Family sherbet pops up there in a few weeks.
No, the cantaloupe is just a perfect example of the lengths to which Lang and Capozzi go to make ice cream, particularly out of local farms’ best organic fruits — the kind that’s delicate, expensive and perishable.
Peak season for local fruit is right now, and the ice cream case is a riot of pinks and purples, including an offering with Kashiwase Farms’ Flavor Supreme pluots and a sorbet using Masumoto Family Farms’ famous sharp-tipped Sun Crest peaches. The Galia melon, a hybrid of honeydew and cantaloupe, is also a big seller.
Garden Creamery’s story is one of two hopeless romantics who have bonded over their ice cream fixation. But dig a little deeper, and you realize there’s more to that narrative. For Donny in particular, putting his all into his work has functioned as a literal lifesaver.
Lang started Garden Creamery in 2012 with little experience and a lot of chutzpah. At the time, she and her then-partner were making coconut-based ice creams and selling them out of a truck in SoMa and other spots. She was utilizing a commissary kitchen at Homeward Bound in Marin — “the Ritz-Carlton of homeless shelters,” Capozzi laughs. Lang recalls, “Donald used to see me at 5 a.m. as I was taking pints to sell at stores.”
Capozzi is a recovering addict who has been sober for 12 years. He was in the Marin shelter working in the maintenance program. “I thought, here is this beautiful girl,” he says, practically blushing, as if reliving the moment. “I would like to go on a date.”
First, he gallantly helped Lang tow a trailer she’d purchased. After her business partner departed, Capozzi jumped in, and they started making all sorts of ice cream — no longer just vegan but varieties using eggs and dairy.
The melon flavor is a merging of Capozzi’s Central Valley farm-boy roots and Lang’s memories of growing up in Hawaii, where she was crazy for Melona bars. Each July, the couple makes the drive to Del Bosque Farms in Firebaugh, about 40 miles west of Fresno, where Capozzi is from, to handpick melons. They discovered the farm by chance, taking back roads on the way to visit family.
“We saw a red barn with a farmstand,” Lang says. “It turned out to be like melon heaven. The farm is regenerative. They treat the fruit like little babies. If you’re going down the [I-5], it’s the best pitstop ever.” Lang is such a Del Bosque proselytizer that some of her customers now make the trip.
The couple lug the melons back to the city, scooping out the flesh and marinating it in sugar — the exact amount adjusted to the month of harvest. “July melon is different than a September melon,” Capozzi says. “The beauty is we can test the brix of the fruit so we can modify things.” (Brix is a measurement of sugar content.) The flesh is then pureed with a huge stick blender and added to the base. There is nothing else.
But the real secret to Garden Creamery — an example of the owners’ blind devotion — is the base. Whereas even the top ice cream shops in SF, like Bi-Rite Creamery, sanely choose to use high-quality, pre-pasteurized, pre-sweetened bases (namely, the high-quality Straus Creamery organic variety), Lang and Capozzi insist on pasteurizing their own base in a closet-size space in the 1,200-square-foot shop, so small it lacks even walk-in refrigeration. This allows them to make different bases for different ice creams, adjusting the sugar as needed.
Inside the tiny pasteurization room is a big, stainless bowl and a piece of equipment that looks like a mid-century seismograph that would be used for mysterious purposes on the USS Enterprise. In reality, it’s for recording and controlling pasteurization — a lengthy process that the California Department of Food and Agriculture monitors quarterly. It’s a lot of work for them. Hardly sexy stuff. Definitely not ‘Grammable.
Though Lang oversees operations, Capozzi is the one immersed in the production process, tasting every melon before deeming it ice cream-worthy. Lang proudly hands me a little scoop of the cantaloupe flavor, its color akin to Benjamin Moore’s Pale Daffodil. It’s dense and creamy but delicate — a facsimile of the melon I just witnessed being processed, the floral aroma now just tickling my nose.
“Making ice cream is part of his sobriety,” says Lang, getting a little teary, clearly proud of her partner. I doubt the line of people happily waiting for a scoop have any idea of the journey taken by this couple — or by the ice cream itself. Maybe I’m a romantic too, but, somehow, I like to think that with one bite — a true frisson of summer — their devotees can taste the love.