B. Atkins & Co. In The News

NEWSDAY Wednesday, May 16, 2001

A LA CARTER
A Cold Front Arrives From Michigan, And It's Delicious
SYLVIA CARTER

WHEN PETE Palazzolo was a kid growing up on the shore of Lake Michigan, he churned ice cream the old-fashioned way. And I do mean old-fashioned. The Palazzolos were even more old-fashioned than my family. We at least had a hand-cranked ice- cream freezer.

"We used a wash pail and a broomstick and a big, galvanized tin tub," Palazzolo, 31, told me the other day. The ice and salt went into the big tub, the ice-cream mixture went into the pail, and the broomstick, turned by hand, was a rudimentary paddle.

Today, Palazzolo is the driving force behind Palazzolo's Gourmet Ice Cream in Douglas, Mich., near Saugatuck, where he grew up.

And today, thanks to distributor Clive Zickel of St.James, under the company name B.Atkins Distinctive Desserts, many of Palazzolo's pure, premium ice creams can be tasted on Long Island, but we will get to that in a minute.

Of course, Palazzolo has slightly more modern freezing equipment nowadays, though he still works on a small scale, making up custom flavors in "batch" freezers, which can handle real ingredients without clogging, unlike the more common "continuous" freezers.

Palazzolo's ice cream weighs twice as much as most ice creams and has no added air whipped into it. Its creaminess comes from density, not fat. Palazzolo believed something simple: "If I have the best products, then the profits will come." He still does.
For the consumer, however, there is just one catch: You have to go to a restaurant to eat Palazzolo's gelati and sorbetti, because it comes in 172-ounce tubs (that's about 11 pints) or 2.5-gallon tubs; Zickel supplies it to Island restaurants. (There is one exception: Breadzilla's in Wainscott sells $6 pints.)

In fact, restaurant chefs ask Palazzolo to make up custom flavors for them, and he gladly does so. Making flavors to order is his stock in trade. At The Wild Goose in Cutchogue, chef Frank Coe serves a deeply delicious custom- made prune-Armagnac gelato. At Cool Fish in Syosset, an outrageous dark chocolate couverture gelato is part of an extravagant chocolate dessert. At Waterzooi in Garden City you are likely to find Bartlett pear sorbet, one of my favorites, and bananas Foster gelato.

Palazzolo makes literally several hundred flavors. He uses fresh fruit from Michigan's "fruit belt," buying up the yield from whole fields of raspberries and orchards of peaches. The company has now purchased orchards and fields. Someone in Florida freezes freshly squeezed lime juice for lime sorbet and ships it to Michigan in 5-gallon batches.

Palazzolo is willing to try everything imaginable. At a customer's request, he has made ice cream containing dried blue corn steeped in butter to reconstitute it. He makes gelato with Brie cheese and pink peppercorns for The Room, a Chicago restaurant, as well as a blue cheese gelato. None are made with commercial products or flavorings. And, Palazzolo said, a chef in New Jersey has him make roasted-garlic-white-chocolate gelato. He makes this wild flavor regularly, he said, and the chef "goes through it."

Among 37 more or less normal flavors we recently tasted at Newsday, there were few real clinkers. (Well, strawberry was wimpy, but that's about it.) Consistently high marks went to these sorbetti: uncommonly flavorful Bartlett pear, bright and true tangerine, subtle red raspberry, and tart- sweet Campari-pear. Gelati tasters liked an incredible malt flavor with chocolate-malt specks in it, unusual cherry zinfandel, smooth single-malt Scotch, roasted pistachio made with whole nuts, Tahitian vanilla forte made with three kinds of vanilla, and an intense, extra-rich dark chocolate. And then there was spiced hazelnut fig, which tasted exactly like Thanksgiving Day in a scoop of ice cream.

I am in love with this ice cream. I am thinking of detouring through Michigan on trips I may make to the Midwest, or to anywhere, so as to sample it at the source. I don't really see much point in ordering ice cream at Long Island restaurants that don't serve Palazzolo's products. Life is too short to eat inferior ice cream.

Zickel, a Chartered Accountant, left the field of banking and finance to go into the infinitely more rewarding task of making Palazzolo's products available to Long Islanders. Zickel and his wife, Margaret, co-founder of B. Atkins, are adding some other "distinctive desserts" to their line, but if they did nothing but supply ice cream and sorbet of this caliber, they would have done the world, or at least this part of it, a great service.

Zickel, who has worked in restaurants as a sous chef, is widely traveled and speaks Italian, French and German as well as his native British-accented English. The Zickels have lived in Italy where, naturally, they ate gelato and loved it.

When Zickel, then working for Chemical Bank in this country, went to Harvard Business School's executive management program, he began to think about starting something of his own.
"Ice cream is the number one dessert everywhere," he thought. "Everybody loves ice cream, and not that many people do it well."

Zickel began to search for the the best ice cream with an eye toward going into business for himself. He tasted something so spectacular that he told Dennis Young, chef and owner of Pentimento in Stony Brook and a friend, that he simply must taste it, too. It was Palazzolo's, and Young immediately placed an order, but Zickel did not yet have a place to keep ice cream or a way to transport it. "For four months," he said, "I had one customer." Then, just as "I was about to pack it in, to be honest," Zickel said, he met Michael Meehan of Tupelo Honey at an event. Meehan became a customer, and then Tom Schaudel, who owns Tease as well as Cool Fish, signed on.

Now, Zickel has a warehouse with ideal storage conditions and a refrigerated truck, and he has more than 50 restaurants as clients, with more signing on daily. But he still makes deliveries himself. "It's a nice way to keep in touch with your customers," said Zickel. As for the ice cream business, he added, "It's the best thing I ever did. I'm so happy."

Who wouldn't be happy? Clive Zickel eats ice cream every single day.

For more information, visit www.batkinsco.com, or phone Clive Zickel at 631-366-0771