• Bear Cieri
• Tommie Hamlett serving a maple-coffee twist creemee at Vermont Cookie Love

Cones of velvety soft ice cream emerged from the window of Vermont Cookie Love into expectant hands. Sarah Richardson and a friend had showed up near closing time for their go-to flavor: a maple-coffee twist.

Richardson lives close to the North Ferrisburgh shop and estimated that the swirled cone in her hand marked her "4,000th creemee" there. "I just think they're the best," she said.

If Vermont has anything on frozen desserts elsewhere, it's creaminess. Or creemee-ness. The creemee — Vermont's word for soft-serve — is the state's iconic (i-cone-ic?) summer treat. While slurping that heap of sweetness, though, most people probably aren't thinking about what goes into a supremely soft ice cream from one of the state's 360 or so frozen dessert purveyors.

• Bear Cieri
• German shepherds Maverick and Captain enjoying a tasty treat

To untwist the mystery of the creemee, Seven Days visited popular scoop shops, talked to a state dairy expert and went to the source of one often-used starting mix. We especially wanted to dip into Vermont's signature confection, the maple creemee.

Vermont Cookie Love's creemees begin at Kingdom Creamery of Vermont, an East Hardwick dairy farm. Most Vermont creemee shops use base from Kingdom Creamery or Massachusetts' Hood, according to E.B. Flory, director of food safety and consumer protection and dairy section chief for the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets.

Vermont Cookie Love owner Matt Bonoma said Kingdom Creamery "make[s] the best product out there. They're going from cow to mix, right there, all in one."

Through a couple of distributors, Bonoma orders three of Kingdom Creamery's base mixes: chocolate, maple and vanilla, the last of which he uses for Cookie Love's homemade coffee flavor. Bonoma wouldn't disclose his recipe for the coffee version, saying only, "We try to not use things that are unnatural in our creemee mix."

• Bear Cieri
• Hand-painted sign at Vermont Cookie Love

The liquid base ships in 2.5-gallon bags and is poured into buckets at the bottom of the frozen dessert machines, two stainless steel, refrigerator-size contraptions.

Most weeks, Vermont Cookie Love goes through 80 to 100 gallons of creemee mix; it might use 250 gallons in the busiest weeks, Bonoma said.

Vermont creemee sellers must have a frozen dessert license to operate the machine that freezes the base. Bonoma described the machine as key to an ideal creemee "that doesn't feel superheavy."

"The machine is doing two things: It's pressurizing that mix, so that when you pull the handle, it comes out. It's also pumping a certain volume of air into the mix that's been very carefully calculated so that you get the right mouthfeel, you get the right consistency," Bonoma said.

The mix that flows into the Vermont Cookie Love machines starts with the milk of about 750 Holsteins. Jeremy and Leslie Michaud and their four sons run Kingdom Creamery, the farm Jeremy's grandparents founded in the 1950s.

• Bear Cieri
• Refilling the creemee mix

Jeremy first got into the frozen dessert business by developing a base for the creamery's own hard ice cream in 2011 and soon got a request for base mix from another local purveyor. Demand grew from there. Today, 85 percent of Kingdom Creamery's sales come from its wholesale ice cream mix, Leslie said.

Ice cream base combines milk with at least 5 percent butterfat content, sugar, stabilizers and emulsifiers. The key to superior creemees, in Flory's view, is the fat content. "It's not the flavor. It's the texture. The butterfat is what coats your tongue and your mouth."

Kingdom Creamery's base is 10 percent butterfat for its four creemee flavors, which include a "neutral" that customers can use to blend in their own flavorings. When the creamery separates the milk from the cream, it can adjust the fat content as requested by customers, though Jeremy believes even premium products need no more than 14 percent butterfat to reach the right mouthfeel. For their maple flavor, the Michauds use syrup from about 4,000 trees that they tap on their property.

Manufacturers of creemee base need a milk handler's license, because turning raw milk into another product requires pasteurization to kill potential pathogens, Flory explained. Instead of the flash-pasteurization system that some commercial manufacturers use, Kingdom Creamery favors a vat pasteurizer, which takes longer and "cooks" the base, Jeremy said: "It caramelizes the sugars. It builds a little more body in the product."

• Bear Cieri
• Topping a dish of creemee with cookie crush

The only other Vermont producer of creemee base for wholesale to shops, according to Flory, is Miller Farm in Vernon; Brattleboro's Lilac Ridge Farm used this base in its creemees last year. Plenty of Vermont's hard ice cream makers use their own base, but few small creemee shops bother to buy the expensive equipment necessary to churn their mix from scratch, Flory said. And those offering only nondairy frozen desserts don't need a milk handler's license.

Certain ingredients — such as eggs and cocoa powder — are considered high risks for contamination, Flory said, and must go into the ice cream base before pasteurization.

The Michauds know how crucial it is to avoid contamination. In summer 2022, Kingdom Creamery had to cease production and recall its ice cream products after Listeria monocytogenes was found in its plant. Kingdom Creamery's business had exploded as the pandemic subsided, and its food safety protocols hadn't kept pace, Jeremy said. The Michauds shuttered the plant and alerted customers to the recall.

"We changed our procedures," Jeremy said, adding that the business knew of no customers getting sick. "We changed our protocols, revamped everything we did to target this organism so it didn't become an issue again."

The product started shipping again in September 2022, and most customers have resumed buying it, Leslie said.

Frozen dessert shops have to follow rules, too, for handling the base mix once it arrives. A shop can add flavoring, including maple or black raspberry syrup, but no ingredients considered high risks for contamination, Flory said.

Monkton's Full Belly Farm sells strawberry and raspberry creemees made with fresh fruit from its fields. To add those ingredients, creemee makers need the state to approve their processes for harvesting, cleaning and converting the fruit into preserve or sauces so that it brings no pathogens to the dessert, Flory said.

Purveyors of maple creemees also must adhere to state labeling rules that restrict the phrase "maple flavored" to products containing 100 percent pure maple syrup or maple sugar, whether sourced in Vermont or not. A shop cannot call it a "Vermont maple" creemee unless it is made entirely with maple produced in the state. Any artificial maple flavoring in the creemee requires a label of "artificial flavor."

• Courtesy
• A maple creemee from Silloway Maple

Bette Lambert, co-owner of Silloway Maple, sells maple creemees from her family's sugarhouse in Randolph Center. She said she has concerns about shops that bill their creemees as "maple" despite using artificial flavoring. The state agriculture agency enforces the rules but typically intervenes only after hearing that a shop is flouting them, Flory said.

Silloway Maple uses a very dark, end-of-season syrup to give its creemees the strongest maple kick, Lambert said. Still, once blended into the base, the creemee color is more ivory than golden brown.

Kate Villeneuve, co-owner of Kate's Food Truck in Jericho, pours real maple syrup into a vanilla base from Hood for her maple creemees, she said. Specialty extracts and natural food colorings go into the creemee mix for a rotating array of exotic flavors, including guava and peppermint. In the spring, lavender creemee is "super popular," Villeneuve said.

"It's a lavender water extract, and it's completely clear," she said. "And then the coloring for that is a purple carrot extract."

Molly Caswell relies on Hood for the base mix at the Village Scoop, the Colchester shop that she and her husband took over from her parents. Hood's 5 percent butterfat content produces a thick consistency that takes longer to melt, she said: "It holds up well with sundaes and dips."

The Village Scoop uses syrup from Vermont sugarmakers, despite the added expense, Caswell added: "As a consumer of ice cream, I prefer the real stuff."

Alison Moon said she never skips a Village Scoop stop when she's in town from California to see her parents in Colchester. "You can't get maple creemees anywhere but Vermont," she said. She was polishing off a cup of black raspberry-maple twist at a picnic table with her parents and her four youngest sons — all with creemees in front of them.

They had visited the Village Scoop twice during their two-week visit. The boys, ages 3 to 11, shared their mom's enthusiasm for the frozen dessert. Six-year-old Hudson Moon, sporting a creemee goatee, contemplated his cup of vanilla with rainbow sprinkles. "It melts," he confirmed.

His brother Cooper, 11, had a stronger opinion about his Reese's Delight sundae. "It's supergood," he said. "And, like the name, it's super creamy."