By Will Grunewald and Joel Crabtree
From our August 2024 issue
Ice cream is a critical element of every Vacationland summer. Strolling down Main Street or sitting on a bench by the shore or relaxing after a hike — are any quintessential Maine experiences not improved with a waffle cone in hand? If we missed any of your personal go-tos, send us a note and let us know — this list might need an update.
Butterfield’s Ice Cream | 946 West Main St., Dover-Foxcroft. 207-802-8004.
Velma and Earl Butterfield opened this stand on their farm in 1950, and though ownership has changed since then, not too much else has. The classic, slow-churned decadence plays especially well in the butter pecan, best enjoyed after a paddle on Sebec Lake or a hike up Borestone Mountain.
Maine Maple Creemee | Greater Portland, Maine
Vermonters are particular about their soft serve. So particular, in fact, that they don’t call it soft serve but rather creemee, in order to differentiate it from the premixed chain-store type of stuff. Owner Hannah Daman imported the term to Maine in 2019, serving her from-scratch soft serve from a truck that pops up throughout the Portland area all summer long. Seasonal flavors range from spruce tip to wild blueberry, but a maple creemee is the Vermont standard (and it tastes even better with Maine syrup, from Sap Hound Maple, in Brownfield).
Sawyer’s Dairy Bar | 34 Main St., Newport. 207-368-5434.
A nostalgic roadside place that’s been around since the 1950s, Sawyer’s serves up a rare old treat: the Boston shake. A New England specialty that’s harder and harder to find, it’s basically a twofer: a milkshake with a miniature hot-fudge sundae dolloped atop, slowly melting into it. There’s no right way to attack something like this, but we suggest alternating spoonfuls and sips until it’s all just blurred into one delicious treat.
Pugnuts |1276 Surry Rd., Surry. 207-412-0086.
Pugnuts is one of those shops where it’s legitimately difficult to decide what to order, compounded by the fact that they serve both gelato and ice cream. For the former, pannacotta has become a customer favorite, showcasing a subtly sweet creamy flavor and a toasty-sweet caramel swirl. For the latter, the orange-pineapple flavor has a refreshing character on a hot day. Or get peanut butter or vanilla and have it smashed inside pug-face chocolate cookies, for a custom ice-cream sandwich. Whatever you order, hang out with it on the front deck, or wander down the road to Surry’s scenic town wharf, at the head of Patten Bay, where ospreys and sometimes seals like to hunt for snacks too.
The Treat Truck | Kennebunk area. 207-569-8949.
Steve and Melanie Smith bought a vehicle with some pretty sweet history — it used to be a cupcake truck. Now, it’s their ice-cream truck. But the most distinctive draw is in fact the homemade popsicles. And what could be more distinctive than a pickle-juice popsicle. If you can clear the psychological hurdles, a pickle pop is a bracingly refreshing thing to order. Or get it for your kid if you want to see a funny face. Check the truck’s website for its weekly pop-up schedule.
100 Years and Still Churning
Round Top Farm’s agricultural history dates back to the mid-1700s, but it wasn’t until 1922, under the ownership of New York businessman Edward Freeman, that the rolling property on the Damariscotta River became a dairy operation. Soon thereafter, with an expanding herd, Freeman and farm manager Edward Denny were left wondering what to do with their overabundance of milk. Ice cream came to mind, and they dished up their first scoops in 1924.
A century later, the farm now serves as headquarters for the Coastal Rivers Conservation Trust, but Round Top Ice Cream (526 Main St., Damariscotta. 207-563-5307.) has kept right on going, churning 700 gallons a day for six months out of the year, on land abutting the original farm. Stephanie Poland, who purchased the business from her parents in 2011, has spent her entire life around ice cream. Her father, a school teacher, spent summers making ice-cream deliveries, and Stephanie would often tag along. As a teenager, she began scooping at the stand.
Those days are still fresh in her mind: “Memories of swinging screen doors opening and closing and the flies and mosquitoes flying into the building,” she says. “We used to manufacture the ice cream in an old part of the farm where they took care of the milk. It was pretty rustic.” The original structures still stand, but production has since moved into a more modernized space. And even though much has changed since 1924, classic old vanilla has consistently remained a top seller. For the past few years, a newly introduced lavender flavor, with lavender sourced from SeaLyon Farm, in Alna, has caught on too, rivaling sales of vanilla. Over the years, some flavors have inevitably fallen by the wayside — cappuccino, lollipop, peppermint patty — getting discontinued either due to customers’ evolving tastes or difficulty sourcing ingredients.
“Right now, sometimes I have a hard time getting certain ingredients, but I bend over backward to try to get them because our customers don’t want to see them in the graveyard,” Poland says. “We have such regular customers that it’s hard to take something away.”
Just as customers tend to return year after year, so do employees. “I have current employees who started with me with a work permit and are still working for me while getting their master’s degree,” she says. “The first year I owned the business, I had a high-school couple — sweethearts — who are now married and have two children. They come in together with their kids.” Someday, maybe, those kids will also spend their summers scooping behind the counter. — J.C.
Mainely Custard | 150 U.S. Rte. 1, Freeport. 207-350-3520.
Mainely custard also offers vegan ice cream, and it’s pretty good, but the main attraction is right there in the name. Mainely Custard’s frozen custard is made the authentic way, with egg yolks to amp up the density and richness. Coffee is a favorite. Best to show up on an empty stomach.
Canty Cow Creamery | 278 Upper St., Turner. 207-713-5145.
Custard is also the specialty at Canty Cow, at Brigeen dairy farm, where the milk is as fresh as can be before it’s frozen. Offerings rotate, but mint chip is tough to beat. The shop was off to a delayed start this summer, due to some preoccupying farm work, but should be up and running by now.
Brrr! Harbor Shaved Ice & Iced Coffee | 1317 Rte. 102, Bar Harbor.
Sweaty and tired after a day of charging around Acadia National Park? One tried-and-true cure is a heaping pile of shaved ice. Brrr! Harbor was on the market last year, and Caleb Litchfield, who had worked behind the counter for years, bought it in time to get it going again for this summer. If you’re bad at making decisions, good luck here, with more than 50 flavors to pick between. We like going off the list of all-natural syrups, without dyes, preservatives, or engineered flavors. Combining basil and strawberry is a savvy move. Or coconut and ginger go well together too. Adventurous eaters will get a kick out of the spicy red pepper.
Me & Ben’s Dairy Creme | 462 Main St., Birch Harbor. 207-963-7752.
The Schoodic Peninsula feels, to many people, like the start of Maine’s down east region, with the relative busyness of the midcoast and Mount Desert Island behind them. And down east is the state’s wild-blueberry heartland. So it’s only appropriate that Me & Ben’s, in the little Schoodic village of Birch Harbor, should make an exceptionally fine wild-blueberry ice-cream sandwich, consisting of two homemade blueberry cookies and a healthy scoop of blueberry hard serve. It’s a popular item, so you might want to call ahead to check availability. Or the not-too-sweet wild-blueberry soft serve always makes for a solid back-up plan.
Nate & Ollie’s Rolled Ice Cream | Unity area. 207-380-9266.
Watching rolled ice cream get made is a little like watching a crepe get made. Batter-like liquid is poured out on what resembles a circular griddle, then it’s spread thin with a spatula. Except that the liquid is actually yet-to-be-frozen vanilla ice cream and the griddle-esque thing is what freezes it. Pick from a whole range of toppings that get chopped up and mixed in. Peanut butter and banana are a winning combo, but the options are many: brownies, cheesecake, Nutella, Fruity Pebbles, and more. The thin wheel of frozen ice cream is cut into strips, rolled, and served. Keep tabs on Facebook to see where the truck is, um, rolling next.
Frinklepod Farm | 244 Log Cabin Rd., Arundel. 207-289-5805.
How many farm stores are dual threats for frozen treats? (Not many, in our experience.) Frinklepod offers oat-based soft serve that’s as silky as it is free of dairy, dyes, gluten, and nuts (which is absolutely). That makes it pretty much friendly to everyone. Flavor options change frequently, but there’s no going wrong. Plus, Frinklepod has a rotating cast of popsicles made on the farm too. A flavor like lime maple is pleasantly tart, while strawberry rhubarb is sweet as pie.
Ready to Ciao Down?
Seventeen years doesn’t seem like nearly enough time to concoct a staggering 2,000-plus flavors, but that’s exactly what Gelato Fiasco (74 Maine St., Brunswick; 207-607-4262. 425 Fore St., Portland; 207-699-4314.) has done since opening its first location, in Brunswick. On average, that means introducing 118 new flavors per year, and they’ve ranged from avant-garde oddballs (avocado cilantro, chipotle lime, horseradish) to reliable crowd pleasers (caramel sea salt, wild blueberry, mint chocolate chip). Since there’s only so much cooler space in Gelato Fiasco’s two shops (the other, in the Old Port, opened in 2012), flavors rotate in and out, and quite a few get retired forever. For customers who harbor a liking for a flavor not currently available, the company’s website includes a “flavor vault” that lists past offerings, with the option to sign up for email alerts if a personal favorite returns to the menu.
Picking a few standouts, even among more regularly featured gelatos, is no easy task. But for a flavor profile that comes across as classically Italian, there’s the extra-creamy texture and the subtle medley of flavors in mascarpone pistachio caramel, a combination inspired by Sicilian cannoli. For more of a fusion of Italian technique and American tastes, there’s the decadent, addictive Big Ole Peanut Butter Pint, which comprises peanut-butter gelato, rich veins of peanut butter, and bites of chocolate peanut-butter cups. And one of the best options isn’t gelato at all: ripe mango sorbetto, a great choice for the dairy-free crowd, impressively evocative of its namesake fruit (but frozen and spoonable and just a touch sweeter). O, The Oprah Magazine once counted that sorbetto among the finest flavors of summer.
Gelato Fiasco deservedly gets a lion’s share of the credit for popularizing gelato in Maine, where, before 2007, the Italian-style ice cream (actually, it’s made with milk rather than cream and has a softer, denser texture) was largely a foreign concept. Company founders Josh Davis and Bruno Tropeano had to be bold to stake their business to gelato, and the best way to experience Gelato Fiasco today is to be bold too. Choose something you haven’t tried before. Or at least sample a few flavors that seem a little out of the ordinary. Fortunately, nothing on the menu is ever actually a fiasco. — W.G.
Scoop Deck | 6 Eldridge Rd., Wells. 207-646-5150.
Scoop Deck pretty much runs out of room on its wall to list all the house-made flavors of hard serve. You’ll probably have questions when you get to the front of the line. What the heck is Dirty Water? Or Dinosaur Crunch? When in doubt, go with the cannoli flavor. The ricotta ice cream is extra rich, and it’s studded with chocolate chips and bits of cannoli shell. Delizioso!
Wild Cow Creamery | 31 Front St., Belfast. 88 Front St., Bangor.
With its couple of water-front locations — the original in Belfast, a truck added in Bangor — Wild Cow has an eye for good real estate. Also, a taste for good ice cream. They make micro batches — only one and a half gallons at a time — of all their flavors. Vanilla with chucks of cherries and dark chocolate is an easy one to love.
Bouchard’s Country Store | 772 Caribou Rd., Fort Kent. 207-834-3237.
The Bouchards, who run Bouchard Family Farm in northernmost Maine, where Acadian culture is prominent, are well known for ployes, the griddled buckwheat flatbreads. No wonder then that, at the farm store, the Bouchards sell ploye ice-cream sandwiches: vanilla soft serve between two pizzelle-like versions of ployes. Délicieux!
Zephyr Ice | 129 Spring St., Portland.
In Hawaii, it’s not shaved ice but rather shave ice. And great emphasis is put on the fineness and fluffiness of the shave, requiring well-honed blades. Owners Julie and Don Martin took that idea and ran with it, making all the fruit syrups from scratch for their obsessively thin flecks of ice. Passion fruit and coconut syrups go well together (and jibe with the island spirit). Add some house-made macadamia ice cream, delicious on its own, also a popular base for shave-ice bowls.
Dorman’s Dairy Dream | 189 New County Rd., Thomaston.
A humble white-clapboard shack on an unscenic stretch of Route 1 between Thomaston and Rockland, Dorman’s still somehow manages to ooze timeless charm. If ever there were a place to grab a chocolate and vanilla soft-serve twist, this is that place.
Duckfat Frites Shack | 43 Washington Ave., Portland.
We’ve intentionally left sit-down restaurants off this list. Such venues often have great frozen desserts, no doubt, but we’re going more for that relaxed, seasonal, grab-and-go feel. Fortunately, in the case of Duckfat’s Original Shake, there’s a workaround: it’s available at the restaurant, but also at Duckfat’s fry-shack outpost, a window-service spot outside Oxbow brewery’s Portland taproom. That shake is a velvety-smooth blend of Smiling Hill Farm vanilla ice cream, Tahitian vanilla beans, and crème anglaise. Or, jeez, the blueberry-and-buttermilk shake isn’t easy to pass up either. Or the sea-salt caramel shake with house-made caramel. Oof. Tough call.
Freya’s | 7 Main St., Rockport.
A fairly new addition to the scene, Freya’s only opened a couple of years ago, in a spot above Rockport Harbor. Purists can try a rotating cast of scoops that might include, say, strawberry-sage-balsamic sorbetto or tiramisu gelato. But adding gelato to a warm crepe warrants serious consideration too. Maybe a scoop of sweet cream atop a Nutella-and-strawberry crepe.
Gorgeous Gelato | 434 Fore St., Portland.
So there definitely isn’t a gelato shortage these days. Gorgeous has been around since 2010, arriving a few years after Gelato Fiasco. The little shop is especially adept at subtler flavors. The pistachio is top notch, as is the hazelnut. Easy on the eyes and the palate.
The Dairy Corner | 612 U.S. Rte. 1, Scarborough. 207-883-6939.
Frozen yogurt’s popularity seems to wax and wane on some sort of mysterious celestial cycle. But at the Dairy Corner, it’s always a mainstay. Of particular note: Dairy Corner does made-to-order fro-yo, meaning that you can have fresh fruit mashed directly into it — no need for flavor extracts. While you’re there, grab a chocolate-covered frozen banana too. Those things are never really in vogue, but never out either.
Mount Desert Island Ice Cream | 7 Firefly Ln., Bar Harbor. 207-479-2197. 51 Exchange St., Portland. 207-210-3432.
From its humble origins in Bar Harbor, MDI Ice Cream has grown a good deal. In addition to its additional location in Portland, it also has one outpost in Washington, DC, and two in Japan. Plenty easy to see why, after you start to run through the menu of hypercreative but thoughtfully balanced flavors. To name but a few standouts: lemon, poppy, and berry jam; blueberry-and-sour-cream crumble; coriander and lemon curd. We’d leave it at that if not for the hojicha too: made with roasted Japanese green tea, it’s like having a nutty matcha ice cream. Pretty near perfection.
Sweetcream Dairy | 128 Main St., Biddeford.
Rather than make things easy, Sweetcream owners Jon Denton and Jacqui DeFranca pasteurize their dairy themselves, to avoid emulsifiers and gums and the like. Their seriousness about their product comes through loud and clear at first taste. Brown butter crunch has a semisweet, carmelized addictiveness. And the maple bourbon pecan is so good you might swear off drinking and just stick with ice cream.
Bresca & the Honeybee | 106 Outlet Rd., New Gloucester. 207-926-3388.
Chef Krista Desjarlais, who’s been a James Beard Awards best-chef nominee multiple times, has spent the past dozen summers in a pretty sweet spot, on the shores of Sabbathday Lake, selling her very chefy ice creams. You never know what you’re going to find, but some past favorites include, on the dairy side of the equation, burnt honey, pear, and rosemary and chamomile apricot. Not-dairy offerings are no less creative. For instance, hazelnut praline with devil’s-food cake.
Afterglow Ice Cream | Embden.
Made on a family farm in Embden with flour from Maine Grains and milk from Waldo’s Springdale Farm, Afterglow’s ice-cream sandwiches are really grounded in Maine. More importantly, they taste spectacular. Offerings rotate, but mint-matcha ice cream between dark-chocolate cookies is one to keep an eye out for. Ditto that for sweet-cream ice cream with a wild-blueberry ripple between lemon cookies. They’re sold at stores in greater Portland, the midcoast, and central Maine. Locations are listed on Afterglow’s website.
Rococo | 8 Western Ave., Kennebunk. 207-835-1049.
We could have just recited the whole menu at Rococo. Wax on about the surprisingly effective flavor combinations, the smart use of textures. But instead we’ll exercise some restraint and simply share our favorite: goat cheese blackberry Chambord. The subtle bittersweetness of the liqueur, the hint of savoriness from the goat cheese, the pop of the berries. Every note plays off the other. As long as it’s on the menu, you really ought to order it.
Bigger Isn’t Always Better (But Sometimes It Is)
Long-running indie stands that make their own ice cream have undeniable charm. Garside’s Ice Cream, for instance, comes to mind (320 Ferry Rd., Saco; 207-283-0045; garsidesmaine.com). The little white shack, tucked away in a residential part of Saco, started serving its ice cream in 1955 and has had a loyal following ever since. Among the many homemade flavors, rum raisin is a favorite.
On the other end of the Maine-made spectrum is Gifford’s, with its several stands, in Skowhegan, Waterville, Bangor, and Farmington, and its ample presence in grocery aisles (giffordsicecream.com). But scaling up production never seems to have required sacrificing quality for Gifford’s — if you just need a basic quart from Hannaford and grab anything other than Gifford’s Old Fashioned Vanilla, you’ve made a mistake. And as good as the ice cream is, stopping by one of the stands, it’s tough not to order a waffle cone loaded up with black-raspberry chocolate-chip frozen yogurt — silky, sweet, and a little tart, all in ideal balance.
Gifford’s isn’t the only outfit with a sizable footprint. Fielder’s Choice has outposts in Sabattus, Brunswick, Old Orchard Beach, Auburn, and Bangor well worth visiting for, among other things, The Closer, a hot-fudge sundae with a freshly baked brownie, and Freezies, slushies blended with soft serve. For the latter, watermelon and vanilla makes for a pretty great combo. Up north, Houlton Farms Dairy runs a trio of stands, in Houlton, Caribou, and Presque Isle, that serve up the Awful-Awful, an extra — or “awfully” — thick frappe that’s topped with a scoop of hard serve. Beals operates two locations in Portland and one in Gorham. A couple of its seasonally available flavors — pumpkin pie and apple pie, both with just the right hit of pie spices, are reason enough to look forward to fall already.
The bigger picture? If ice cream is made in Maine, it’s probably darn good, whether from a solo shop, a small chain, or the freezer section at the supermarket.
Stone Fox Farm Creamery | 398 East Main St., Searsport. 207-323- 2850.
Stone Fox doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel (or ice cream, for that matter). It just does what it does very well. That’s why it’s the right source for straight-up chocolate. No bells or whistles. Just dense and chocolaty. The kind of chocolate that will stain your tongue. And the kind that will keep you coming back for another scoop.
John’s Ice Cream Factory | 510 Belfast Augusta Rd., Liberty. 207-589-3700.
John Ascrizzi is the John behind the ice cream. Food runs in the family. His grandfather was a baker in southern Italy. His dad was a pasta maker in New York. He eventually wound up in the ice-cream biz. He has partners now and isn’t as involved day-to-day, but his shop remains a community mainstay, with the a cozy atmosphere in which, oh, say, butter pecan feels about right.
Blanchard’s Creamery | 660 Boothbay Rd., Edgecomb. 207-687-8271.
Blanchard’s just opened in 2020, but it feels like it’s been around longer. Maybe that’s because owner Mary Blanchard has old roots in Dover-Foxcroft dairy farming. Maybe it’s the 19th-century barn the shop is in. Maybe it’s the long list of familiar flavors, like the cookie dough, always loaded with dough.
Seeking more nostalgia? These Maine soda fountains are still dishing out floats, frappes, and sundaes.
