It's Cool to Serve Ice Cream

AMERICANS love ice cream. More than 1.8 billion gallons are reportedly sold annually and ice cream is a $6 billion industry.

Perhaps, no one in food service knows America's love affair with ice cream better than Michael Hu, executive pastry chef of the renowned 1640-room Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Last year Hu's pastry department served ice cream more than 100, 000 times.

Hu is no stranger to ice cream, having grown up in Hawaii. "People love ice cream," he says. "No matter what we create as pastry chefs, ice cream is always the number one seller.

The Waldorf's pastry department is part of the hotel's $50 million food and beverage operation of which 80 percent of the revenue is produced from banquets. The hotel is a well refined banquet machine that can produce memorable functions for 10 to 3,000 people.

Hu is proud of the banquet desserts served at the hotel and ice cream is incorporated into most of them. The hotel offers 40 different flavors of ice cream for banquets. For small functions and in the hotel's three different restaurants, he likes to present plated ice cream desserts that delight guests with a complex harmony of texture, flavors, colors and temperatures. For large functions, Hu serves simpler desserts in which high quality ingredients are presented in the most elegant way possible.

Hu uses chocolate containers for ice cream for both small and large functions. "Chocolate goes perfectly with ice cream and the containers are an elegant way to present the ice cream," says Hu. "Plus, for very large banquets , you can fill the containers in advance and the chocolate can withstand the cold temperatures of the freezer and the humidity in summer months."

While several companies make chocolate containers for pastry chefs, Hu has always been impressed with those products by Chocolates à la Carte. "Not only are they made of the highest quality chocolate, but the company keeps developing new styles of them," he says.

Hu particularly likes Chocolates à la Carte's folded lined cups for banquets. "Unfortunately, its initial size was too small for my signature banquet dessert that contains three flavors of ice cream," he says. "But as soon as I told the company of my problem, they developed a larger size for me that is now called 'The Waldorf Cup'."

Hu says the keys to success with serving ice cream in banquets are good communication and good equipment. For starters, there must be open communication between the hotel's sales and pastry departments. Then the sales people need to be educated on how well to sell ice cream desserts, when to sell them and for what types of functions.

It is essential to have good ice cream suppliers that are service oriented and can handle your sales capacity and are able to assist with special requests and emergencies.

A good reliable freezer goes without saying, he notes.

Overall, working with ice cream requires a lot of practice and flexibility.

Hu likes to tell the story of when he formerly worked for the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York and did an important off-site catering job in summer for an American ambassador on the Intrepid Aircraft Museum. The client ordered and ice cream dessert for the function but there were no freezers left on the ship. To solve the problem, Hu and his staff packed the ice cream on dry ice in air tight containers and took them to the ship. The method worked. Unfortunately, the ice cream became so hard it took over two hours to bring it up to serving temperature. Luckily, he had allowed enough time for unexpected problems.

Michael Hu's tips on plating-up ice cream desserts for banquets:

• Plating ice cream dessert for huge banquets is like conducting a symphony--it takes a lot of practice, time, and organization to get it right.
• If you fill chocolate containers in advance with ice cream and put them in the freezer; allow enough time to bring ice cream up to 18 to 22 degrees F. before serving.
• The profit margin in preparing ice cream desserts for large banquets is good enoug to allow you the time and money to create more intricate desserts for smaller functions.