Salt and Straw ice cream, which recently opened a new store at City Center Bishop Ranch in San Ramon, California, is known for its exotic flavors. For Spring this year, the West Coast chain has a new series of seasonal flavors which comes with a challenge: “Eat Your Flowers.”
Salt and Straw isn’t just slapping an edible blossom atop a vanilla cone and calling it a day, either. The store has four new flavors, each of which allows patrons to literally eat different kinds of flowers, in delicious ice cream form. Many of the featured flowers are found around — or directly sourced from — the Bay Area, which means you can literally get a taste of the local foliage.
Rhubarb crumble with toasted anise is built around the anise flower, which has a licorice flavor often used in Indian cuisine, and to flavor licorice candies. The flower is combined with rhubarb in a baked crumble, which is served over vanilla ice cream.
Anise is found all over the Bay Area. While it’s a beloved plant in places like Italy, here by the Bay, the anise plant (also called fennel) is considered an invasive weed. You’ve almost certainly seen it gracing abandoned lots, or stubbornly growing through cracks in the concrete dividers on Highway 24. Despite its low-brow environs, the Bay Area’s anise smells just as good at Italy’s, with the same distinctive licorice aroma which Salt and Straw works into their flavor.
Jasmine Milk Tea and Chocolate is inspired by the West Coast’s ubiquitous boba tea (as well as the tea traditions of China and Taiwan). Most people probably don’t know that the “jasmine” in jasmine tea refers to a small, white, fragrant flower that imparts its unique flavor to the tea, and also to this ice cream. Salt and Straw sources their tea from Red Blossom Tea Company on Grant Ave.
Many Bay Area homeowners have jasmine in their backyards, and if you walk around the area, you’ve almost certainly experienced its powerful, sweet smell, perhaps without knowing. In this case, jasmine flowers are combined with green tea and chocolate to make Salt and Straw’s ice cream.
Wildflower Honey with Ricotta Walnut Lace Cookies takes a different tack, distilling the essence of the Bay Area’s wildflowers (with the help of bees) into a lemon and ricotta flavor which is blended into honey ice cream, along with crumbles of oat cookies. The honey for this flavor is sourced from local beekeepers, ensuring that you’re really getting a taste of our local terroir.
Salt and Straw’s final flower-inspired flavor is Mathilde’s Hibiscus and coconut sherbet, a vegan flavor that celebrates the work of a Haitian woman who created a hibiscus ginger brew inspired by her country and its flowers, and is now partnering with a Portland, Oregon company Portland Mercado to bring it to the United States — and to Salt and Straw’s menu.
Beyond the gardens of a few intrepid Bay Area residents, hibiscus flowers don’t grow locally. But you probably know them from two places — the design on bottles of Fiji water (which everyone here loves to drink, even though we know we shouldn’t), and from Hawaii, which often feels like an unofficial extension of the Bay Area.
On a recent visit to Salt and Straw, I ate some flowers myself by trying the Wildflower Honey and Ricotta Lace Cookies flavor. It was delicious — a subtle blend with strong hints of lemon, which reminded me of the creaminess of lemon ricotta pancakes.
In addition to their new San Ramon store, Salt and Straw has locations in Pacific Heights, Hayes Valley, Burlingame, Palo Alto, Valley Fair, and Oakland. Check them out, and this Spring you can be sure to eat your flowers, too.
Sign up for The Bold Italic newsletter to get the best of the Bay Area in your inbox every week.
