Tyler Malek is widely considered an ice cream savant. As the co-founder of Salt & Straw in Portland, Ore., he has worked with flavors as varied as apple cider doughnut, bone marrow and something he called “culinary perfume.”
But in the spring of 2024, he thought he might have met his match. He was on a quest that proved surprisingly elusive: to revive and rebuild the Choco Taco, a childhood ice-cream-truck favorite created in 1983.
It wasn’t going well.
“I had closed myself in a room and spent months talking to everyone from Turkey to Germany to Poland to Vancouver, B.C., hunting this down,” he said. Over and over, ice cream equipment manufacturers told him it couldn’t be done.
A faux taco shell filled with ice cream doesn’t sound so complex. But Klondike, which stopped selling the Choco Taco in 2022, had made a few adjustments for the sake of mass production. The sugar cone shell was pliable rather than crunchy, to prevent shattering. Inside, a haphazard chocolate coating left plenty of places where ice cream touched cone, a recipe for sogginess.
“There’s a lot of ways to make an ice cream taco,” Mr. Malek said. “And very few compromises I was willing to make.”
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The post How an Ice Cream Obsessive Recreated the Choco Taco appeared first on New York Times.
