http://www.gainesvilletimes.com/archives/103216/
Mountain Fresh Creamery ice cream comes fresh from the cow
Clermont-based business makes dessert the minute after milking
Kelsey Williamson
kwilliamson@gainesvilletimes.com
August 13, 2014
From cow to cone in less than a day — that’s how Mountain Fresh Creamery produces some of the freshest, creamiest, richest ice cream in North Georgia, according to the store’s motto.
When Scott and Jennifer Glover opened the Clermont location in 2011, their primary focus was providing fresh, local, all-natural nonhomogenized milk to the community. However, they knew the high-quality product would make a phenomenal ice cream. The public agreed.
“Once we got into ice cream and got started, it was just kind of overwhelming how much people loved the ice cream,” Scott Glover said.
Mountain Fresh Creamery creates various flavors throughout the year, includingstrawberry, pretzel, basil, eggnog, cotton candy and salted caramel. The flavors are hand-dipped and made in a batch-freezing machine three times a week.
Glover said the creamery keeps between 10 and 12 flavors on hand and usually has chocolate, vanilla, peach, strawberry, butter pecan and salted caramel on any given day.
“By far chocolate is our most popular,” he said.
The company also makes seasonal flavors, such as pumpkin for fall, Key lime pie for summer, and gingerbread for the holidays. No matter the flavor, however, every batch of ice cream starts the same way.
“Our ice cream mix is for a frozen, hand-dipped ice cream,” Glover said. “We do 100-gallon batches at a time of our mix. We make six to eight flavors in a day, and three gallons of our mix makes about five gallons of ice cream.”
The mix begins when the cows are milked. The Glovers and their staff pull the cream off the milk to make the low-fat milk and save the cream for the ice cream. Then they add 42 gallons of whole milk to 38 gallons of cream with solids and stabilizers from a dairy products company. Sugar finishes off the mix.
“All of our flavors are added during the batch-freezing process,” Glover said. “Our vanilla ice cream is nothing but the mix put through the batch freezer. We realized that we didn’t need to add a flavoring to it.”
The other flavors get only about 2« ounces of a flavoring per three gallons. The peach and strawberry mixes have no added flavors because they are made with purees from Jaemor Farms’ fruit.
“We want people to taste the quality and the creaminess before they taste the flavor,” Glover said.
Mountain Fresh Creamery’s product is considered a premium ice cream because it contains 16 to 18 percent fat and is made with nonhomogenized milk, so the fat particles are left whole.
“You’ll notice that you have a little bit of a coating in your mouth because those fat particles are whole, and you can taste the more creamy part because of that,” Glover said.
Since the ice cream is so fresh, the creamery runs out of almost every flavor by the end of the week but is always making new batches to change up the flavors.
Cindy Dyer’s family had been buying Mountain Fresh Creamery’s milk for a while since they live in nearby Demorest, but they hadn’t stopped to taste the homemade ice cream until recently.
“This is our first summer coming out here, and I think this is already our fourth time,” she said. “This is the best strawberry I’ve had. It tastes so fresh.”
Dyer brought her friend, Mackenzie Loudermilk, to the creamery for the first time. Dyer mentioned how good the ice cream was during the drive. Now, Loudermilk knows for herself.
“I got the salted caramel,” Loudermilk said. “It’s sweet and it has chunks of pecans in it. It’s creamier than regular ice cream.”
In addition to being nonhomogenized and vat pasteurized, the milk for the ice cream is antibiotic- and hormone-free, as the Glovers believe healthy cows with a natural diet produce a better-quality product.
“Everything that our cows are fed is locally grown,” Glover said. “They get a grain mix with vitamins and minerals, and their food is looked at by a nutritionist. We make sure that our cows get everything they need to make milk and stay healthy with no fed-through antibiotics. We only give the cow antibiotics if it’s critical, and that milk is discarded.”
For now, the creamery is adjusting to end-of-summer hours with school in session. In the future, however, the Glovers hope to expand and add more freezer and storage space to grow and produce even more creamy, fresh flavors.
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