Gabrielle Carbone, co-owner of the Bent Spoon Photo: Eating in Translation/Flickr

Since Gabrielle Carbone and Matthew Errico opened the doors of Princeton, N.J.'s The Bent Spoon in 2004, their ice cream shop has become synonymous with high-quality, imaginatively flavored ice cream, winning over countless customers with flavors like cardamom-ginger, dark chocolate habanero and mint julep. Called one of the Top Nine Ice Cream Places in America, it's one of a growing number of ice cream shops that have shaken off the shackles of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry to bring frozen dairy into the brave new world of small-batch, artisanal production and top-shelf organic and seasonal ingredients.

As we're entering the height of ice cream season (though true aficionados would argue that ice cream has no season), and with National Ice Cream Month around the bend, we turned to Carbone for a primer in All Things Ice Cream.

What makes good ice cream?
Oh man. You know, it kind of boils down to good ingredients. You can make good ice cream hands down if your dairy and eggs are good. The organic yolks we use are bright orange and creamy, and our dairy is hormone-free. It's great if the recipes are good, but if you start with good ingredients, you end up with good stuff.

Oyster ice cream, bourbon-vanilla ice cream swirled with sea salt and Dolly Madison, after the jump.

A sampling of flavors at the Bent Spoon. Photo: eszter/Flickr

Can you break down the different varieties of ice cream for us? Like what's the difference between ice cream, frozen custard and gelato?
That's a difficult question. In Italy, gelato is an important tourist food. But it's different in Northern Italy versus Sicily. There are lots of myths surrounding it -- that it's lower in fat, for example. [Editor's Note: Not everyone agrees with Carbone that this is a myth.] In Sicily they don't use eggs and do use a lot of fresh fruit. In Northern Italy, they use a crème anglais, or custard base. That's what we do here.

The other thing with gelato is overrun, or the amount of air that's incorporated into it. It has a lot less air [than regular ice cream]. Also, it's served at a warmer temperature in the gelato case. Our ice cream tends towards the Northern Italian or French style; we use a crème anglais base and Italian equipment, and serve out of a gelato case because we love the temperature to be 5- to 10 degrees warmer than it is for hard ice cream. On the tongue, the fruit flavors are so much more intense.

Frozen custard, on the other hand [is] put through a soft-serve machine and served even warmer than gelato. Often, what comes out of our batch freezer tastes like soft serve, whereas soft ice cream is ice cream without the custard base; it's just ice cream. I tend to shy away from soft ice cream -- it's just ice cream with emulsifiers.

How did you get interested in ice cream?
It's one of those lifelong things: I got my first ice cream maker when I was 14 -- you either put it in a closet or use it, and I was one of the ones who used it . My partner Matt and I both graduated college with different degrees but were interested in doing a business. We opened in May 2004 and just celebrated our five-year anniversary.

You're known for doing lots of different and unusual flavors. How do you decide which flavors to use?
We've hit the over-425 mark. It's unbelievable in some ways -- I thought maybe we'd have 12 flavors and that's all we'd ever do. The availability of ingredients dictates what we make. Nine months out of the year we really have some great stuff. The other three months have great fresh ricotta and goat cheese. We had four weeks of strawberry flavors because we got 500 pounds of organic local strawberries. We used them up and that was that.

Now it's plum season, and soon there'll be cherries from the local orchard. And then there will be nectarines – nectarine sorbet is one of my favorites. And then even with all the herbs, mint comes with the strawberries, for example, so the flavors just come to you. I also get inspired when I'm eating out or making drinks – I think I'd enjoy being a bartender as much as making ice cream.

How much ice cream do you make everyday?
Oh my god, so much! One of us gets here at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. I'll be here till 9. It's labor-intensive because we make everything. In the summer we're just peeling and peeling all of the fruit. We supply 15 to 20 local restaurants and a couple of specialty stores in Princeton. It's a very small batch operation done in an 800-square-foot store. It's really hard to say how much we make; we do 18 flavors a day and then restaurant stuff and also supply a gelato case at Princeton. Thankfully, even in this economy we're insulated a little bit because we're an affordable luxury.

What's business like in the winter?
We also sell this European-style hot chocolate with homemade marshmallows. And we sell about 2,000 chocolate and vanilla cupcakes a week.

In the last few years there's been a surge of ice cream stores and companies that are making a ton of creative and inventive flavors, and using organic ingredients.
I came from always loving ice cream but being exposed to very traditional flavors like cookies and cream. When I started making it, it was 'wow, this is exciting.' On one hand, I thought we were doing something different and new, but on the other, other places were doing the same thing. It was like a renaissance. But then I realized this is not a new thing at all: when I did research I discovered that in the late 1700s and 1800s there were all sorts of crazy flavors. Dolly Madison's favorite flavor was oyster! I collect a lot of different ice cream cookbooks and have this very old book whose flavors are flavors I make now, like pear rose geranium sorbet. I was like, are you kidding me?

What I found out was that basically the industrialization of our food system in the 1950s made a whole group of people eat vanilla and strawberry because that's what they made. People got away from their local parlors and started to buy TV dinners and mass-marketed ice cream. So we almost lost the small batch, making crazy flavors thing. Today, I'm serving little 4- and 5-year-olds who ask for ricotta; that warms my spirit more than anything.

What are your top-selling flavors?
We do 18 a day, so it's tough to say. We switch a lot but keep five or six. There's always chocolate, vanilla and mango sorbet. There's ones that we have to bring back every week or two or people start storming the store, like bourbon ice cream that we swirl sea salt and caramel into. Also, seasonal ones like strawberry marscapone – people go crazy for it. And cardamom-ginger. We don't have it a lot and people are always asking for it.

Last question: Did you ever make that oyster ice cream?
I did, for a contest at seafood place. It was totally good, like making cream of oyster soup and then freezing it.