Perfect Pint
Salted caramel, chocolate and almonds from Perfect Pint.
When the pandemic struck and left sommelier Jordan Panaiotov and restaurant host Gabrielle Nagengast out of work, the couple took action. And with entrepreneurial zeal and at the risk of their life savings, they are now on the verge of tasting sweet success.
And that success tastes like frozen custard.
Panaiotov, born in Bulgaria, but who came to the valley when he was a kid, graduated from Palm Springs High School, and is about to celebrate his 20th high school reunion, looked around and saw that a great many people reacted to the pandemic by starting home-based small businesses. With his business acumen (He once owned Cali Safe Access, one of the valley’s first cannabis delivery services) and Nagengast’s cooking skills (She is a culinary school graduate) they decided their home business should be food-based. But what? “We saw that a lot of people were making tamales, barbeque, pizza, bread, and things like that. For months I would be, ‘Hey, how about this or how about that?’ And she’d be, like, ‘No, that’s been done to death.’ But we finally focused on custard because it’s a luxury item that would really appeal to the kind of clients we’d been serving (in restaurants) for years.”
They purchased a battered old freezer that Panaiotov on Craigslist for $125 and installed it in their Palm Desert condo. They next located a couple ice cream churners and began the long, laborious process of learning to make custards and experimenting with flavors. They posted pictures of the results on Instagram and invited all the neighborhood kids over for free ice cream. They would then post photos of the kids chowing down on their concoctions.
And what concoctions. Southern banana pudding with ‘nilla wafers, pistachio custard with raspberry preserves and white chocolate chunks, Coachella Date with date and cinnamon custard and walnuts, Orange Blossom Honey Crème Brulee … each menu item is more mind blowing than the last. And most impressive is that the couple is able to source many of their ingredients locally from other small business entrepreneurs, like 818 coffee from La Quinta, Brandini toffee, and medjool dates from Rancho 51 in Mecca.
However, it all starts with a perfect custard. Unlike Philadelphia-style ice cream (which, Panaiotov says, is the style of ice cream most Americans eat), “custard is a pudding. It has egg yolks cooked into it. We cook two yolks per pint and that adds fat, and fat is flavor. It takes two hours to prepare. There are no shortcuts to doing it; there’s no way to make it cheaply.”
Panaiotov points out that even the big ‘premium’ ice cream makers buy huge bags of pre-sugared milk, use artificial flavors and colorings, and a host of additives to bind their ice creams and give it air. After Nagengast has made the custard (When she’s on a roll, she can make four custards at a time, each holding about 24 pints), it is cooled overnight before going into the churning. And, at this point, every single ingredient is mixed in by hand. The result is an extraordinarily rich, dense, creamy dessert that highlights the ingredients.
The neighborhood kids certainly loved it. The menu was coming together…and just in the nick of time.
Complaints were coming in from their HOA about the dozens of bags of ice Panaiotov was crushing every day over his neighbor’s ceiling and the three commercial freezers they installed in the living room finally brought cease and desist orders from the Health Department. Panaiotov found a small retail/manufacturing space in an office development on Melanie Place off Cook Street. Now, they are on the menu at both LG’s Steakhouses, the Hotel Paseo, the Cliffhouse and the Colony Palms. On September 1, Perfect Pint opened their shiny Airstream outlet at the Garden on El Paseo. However, if you’re looking for a cone or a tiny sample on a disposable wooden spoon, you’re out of luck. Perfect Pint is sold only in containers. The clear-thinking Panaiotov did this so that their product would be classified as a grocery item, not subject to resale tax and not in danger of the closures and restrictions affecting food businesses because of ongoing Covid closures and restrictions.
As the season begins, Panaiotov and Nagengast are confident a discerning public will anoint Perfect Pint. Panaiotov shrugs at the foregone conclusion. “Custard is king.”
