Greater's Ice Cream Read Online Free

French pots. But after the war, commercial refrigeration and more sophisticated ice cream makers came along, and batch freezers disappeared. With the continuous commercial freezers, the mix of cream, sugar and eggs was poured in and quickly whipped with fast-moving beaters. These machines continuously spit out the ice cream—basically the antithesis of Graeter’s.
    At Graeter’s, the mix was cranked in small batches—even today, a batch of Graeter’s makes only two and a half gallons—and had to be scraped by hand from the sides of the pots and hand-packed into cartons. The Graeter’s method incorporated the least amount of air into the ice cream, making it more dense and luxurious.
    Dick Graeter remembers trying to make Graeter’s Ice Cream in one of the newer ice cream makers when he joinedthe company in the 1950s. “You couldn’t make the product that we were making in that type of a freezer. It would turn it into butter,” Dick said. “I tried that several different times when I came here.”
    The new machines created a version of ice cream that was lighter in texture and airier than Graeter’s. By law, ice cream could have as much as 100 percent overrun, or be as much as 50 percent whipped-in air. It was, in essence, frozen foam. Graeter’s had (and still has) only a small amount of air that inevitably gets mixed in during the freezing process, just between 20 and 25 percent. A pint of Graeter’s weighs almost a pound, whereas the competition’s ice cream might weigh half as much.
    Dick insists it wasn’t just a pure love of the product that kept them from giving up the labor-intensive French pot method for a perhaps more lucrative continuous freezer version. “I always said that we were too dumb to make the next step, didn’t know any better.”
    The changes in ice cream production came hand in hand with the onset of commercial dairy farms. The number of small dairy farms dwindled starting in the 1930s for more than fifty years because it became cost-prohibitive. Dairy farmers figured out what to feed cows to get the maximum output in milk. The annual average yield per cow rose from 3,000 pounds in 1890 to 4,500 pounds in 1950.
    Insulated trucks led to larger milk-processing plants, which could process the milk at a much lower cost. Dairy products, including the milk and cream needed for ice cream, decreased in price. For dairy farms to make money, they needed bigger operations.
    Local competition in ice cream increased with the introduction of United Dairy Farmers (UDF) in the 1940s. Started by Carl H. Lindner Sr. and carried on by his children, the group started one of the first dairy stores, where milk and other dairy products, including ice cream, were sold instead of home delivered. Despite growing popularity and convenience, the UDF ice cream was made by the continuous method, making the product a far cry from the hand-packed, dense ice cream made at Graeter’s.

    The plant at Reading Road includes pots for cream and men making the ice cream to the left. Courtesy of the Cincinnati Historical Museum .
    Another change to the ice cream industry was the introduction of soft serve, which became possible because of new equipment that hadn’t been available until this time. “There was a soft serve place on every corner after the war,” Dick said. “It really put the ice cream businesses like ours out of business. All ice cream like ours was sold in drugstores. There wasn’t a drugstore anywhere that didn’t have an ice cream fountain.” Soft serve, sometimes referred to as frozen custard, was new and different—and widely available.
    Like many culinary inventions, the history of soft serve is not definite. More than one claim to its creation exists. In oneversion, the silky smooth semi-frozen mixture was created by the founders of Dairy Queen, J.F. McCullough and his son, Alex, in Davenport, Illinois,