There are ice cream stands, and then there’s Bresca & the Honeybee
There are ice cream stands, and then there’s Bresca & the Honeybee
There’s ice cream, and then there’s ice cream.
Set in a shack on the edge of Sabbathday Lake in New Gloucester, Bresca & the Honeybee definitively serves the latter. Specifically, its Buttermilk Panna Cotta ice cream with blueberry compote and brown butter crumble.
If it sounds like a cheffy dish, that’s because it is. Owner Krista Kern Desjarlais of the Purple House in Yarmouth and former Portland restaurant Bresca is among Maine’s most revered chefs (and a repeated James Beard Award nominee). To the delight of ice cream lovers, she has devoted her attention in recent years almost exclusively to producing extraordinary small-batch ice cream at Bresca & the Honeybee.
“I still think like a person in a fine-dining restaurant kitchen,” Desjarlais said. “All the components are thought about, because that’s where my head is from.”
The Buttermilk Panna Cotta ice cream clearly benefits from the obsessive attention of a talented fine-dining chef, though it remains fully approachable, an elevated little sundae with a delightful mix of flavors and textures. Desjarlais starts with a custard-base for the ice cream – heavy on the egg yolk – and blends it with tangy buttermilk to balance the richness of the yolks.
She cooks the custard with Tahitian vanilla beans, which lends a lightly floral, soft vanilla flavor. In the end, the panna cotta ice cream tastes like a more sophisticated and nuanced vanilla ice cream, exquisitely creamy with a lovely faint tartness from the buttermilk.
The blueberry compote, made with local blueberries and maple syrup, is a saucy spoonful of Maine. Like the ice cream itself, Desjarlais’ compote is a master class in flavor balance, striking just the right blend of fruity sweetness and palate-enlivening acidity.
The crumble uses gluten-free flour (Bresca & the Honeybee is fully gluten-free), which caused Desjarlais some fits at first as she tried to find the right mix of gluten-free flour to sugar and butter: Early test runs came out greasy, or dry and sandy.
Her tinkering paid off, as the crumble gives the dish the crisp-crunchy element it needed to really sing. In all, it’s a wonderfully lush dish, though not overly sweet or outright decadent.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that you can enjoy Bresca & the Honeybee’s treats lakeside – the setting is idyllic. But, oh, that ice cream.
Buttermilk Panna Cotta ice cream with blueberry compote and brown butter crumble, $5-$8 (baby, single and double sizes), Bresca & the Honeybee, 106 Outlet Road, New Gloucester. brescaandthehoneybee.com
