Graeter's is the world's best ice cream and this is your neighborhood store's page where you get to show us why!
Passionate people produce the best products. When modern technology came to ice cream, Regina Graeter stubbornly refused to change. Still family owned, Graeter’s is now the last ice cream still crafted in French Pots, just 2½ gallons at a time. Stop by and try for a scoop for yourself.
It's creamy, it's delicious, and it's the perfect way to cool down on a hot afternoon. Believe it or not, people used to make ice cream by hand, and some people still do. The greater family has been churning out ice cream since 1870, when Louis Charles Grader sold it out of a small storefront. By that time, since you didn't have modern refrigeration, you had to eat it as soon as you finished making it. So, you would make up a batch and sell it to the passersby. That's how we got started. Four generations later, Graders is still a family-owned business using the original family recipe. The recipe for ice cream is real basic. It's cream, milk, sugar, and eggs. Of course, it's not quite that simple. The thing that makes this family recipe unique is they don't just use eggs, they use egg custard. And making that egg custard is the first step. Milk, sugar, and eggs go into a huge high-shear mixer. Once they're mixed, they're p Back when I was a kid, and I worked with my grandpa, we would make the egg custard in 12-gallon batches in a copper kettle over an open flame. Now we use that bat pasteurizer, and it makes about 260-gallon batches of egg custard. Once it's ready, the custard is p But wait a minute, aren't we making ice cream? Where's the cream? It's here in these huge 300-gallon tubs. Once everything's ready, it's all p Today were making black raspberry chocolate chip, so it's very simple. We add pure black raspberry puree. Once the flavor'stirred all the way in, more dairy mix is added. And here's where the cream meets the ice. Graders still makes ice cream just The French pot method is how everybody made ice cream back in the 1800s before you had modern equipment. Once the flavored mix is poured into a pot, it's placed in a specially designed freezer that spins the pot. As the cream on the outside edges frees, it'scraped off, forming a super-soft, slow frozen ice cream. It's basically a high-tech version of the old hand-crank ice cream buckets. One thing that makes Graders is that French pot freezer, making ice cream in small two-and-a-half gallon batches. And we still do that. And we are the only place in the world where you can come and see ice cream made that way. Once the ice cream is finished, it's time to add the chocolate chips. They don't just d Instead, they take 10-pound bars of dark chocolate, melt them down, and then pour the chocolate into the frozen spinning pot, where it solidifies again. And then the ice cream artisan will lower the blade back into the French pot and stick his paddle in, and then that chops it up into a bunch of little pieces. Little and not so little, that is. Well, we say little, but they're all different sizes. You can find a chunk that just can't even fit on the spoon. All that thick, creamy ice cream and big chocolate chunks also can't fit through a filling nozzle. That'so thick that you can't pack it with an automatic filling machine. Every pint has to be packed by hand with the spoon one at a time. So our little plant will hand pack maybe four million pints a year. Every year, graders make around 900,000 gallons of ice cream. That's enough to give an ice cream cone to every person who enters Disneyland for a year.
