Normally, this thing we call an interview is a series of questions. Between each question, an answer. Not so with John Harrison, official taster for Nestlé Drumstick and Edy’s Grand Ice Cream products.

This is a man born to taste ice cream 60 times a day, and apparently, born to turn the answer to the first question in an interview into a single, elongated, charming, funny short story of a response that constitutes a discrete blog entry with no follow-up required.

Harrison, in town to promote the Nestlé Drumstick’s Lil’ Heroes contest for junior do-gooders, will offer a tasting demo from 10 to 11 a.m. on Friday, July 17, at Dierbergs Market Place, 1730 Clarkson Road, Chesterfield, 636.537.9400. If you go, ask him about the Cookies ’n Cream flavor – he invented it.

“Describe the typical day for an ice cream taster,” I asked Harrison.

He answered.

“It starts early in the morning, when my taste buds are fresh,” he said. “I drink herbal decaf tea, because caffeine affects the top note, you see, the nose. I have a bland-menu diet for that reason, too, in fact.

“I get down to the laboratory between 7 and 7:30 a.m., and I’m tasting all of yesterday’s ice cream that was produced, before it leaves the plant, for quality control and assurance. It’s 60 packages I’m tasting every morning, 20 different flavors, each one made from a different shift. I use a gold spoon – wood and plastic have a slight resin aftertaste.

“It’s like a wine tasting. I start with the white wines of ice cream – the vanillas: double vanilla, French vanilla, and so on, and I work my way up to the heavy Bordeaux of ice cream, such as black walnut, and mint chocolate chip.

“Now, we all have 9,000 taste buds. Mine are insured for a million dollars – that’s about $110 per bud [laughs], and we only have four flavor profiles that we know of. The back of the tongue is bitter to keep us from swallowing things we should not. On the tip of the tongue is the sweet, and on the sides are salty and sour. What I do initially is take a small amount on the spoon right from the top of the ice cream, where it’s warmest, and invert the spoon. My tasting method is the three S’s: swirl, snack and spit. You don’t have to swallow to taste, you swallow to get nutrition.

“You can see pictures of me at icecream.com. There are videos of me there, too, and I have answers to common ice-cream questions. I did the taping of the videos at a St. Louis company by the way, Zipatoni.

“Anyway, the ice cream must look appetizing, too – we all taste first with our eyes. Number two is flavor, number three is texture. All three have to be in orchestration to have a good eating experience. For flavor, I smack, I swirl it on all 9,000 taste buds, I aerate it to drive up the top note to the nose, to the olfactory nerve in the forehead. The olfactory nerve is where we experience flavor. Right next to the olfactory nerve is the sinus nerve. When we get a cold and the sinus nerve swells, it blocks the olfactory nerve, and we revert back to the tongue because we don’t get the bouquet, the top notes.

“OK, so then, I score the sample, I write down the score. Then I go deeper into the sample. Here I am looking for two words: smooth and creamy. We don’t want cold, coarse, icy, fluffy, gummy, ‘Sneezy’ or ‘Dopey.’ You know those guys? [Laughs.] I also look at cookies, chocolate, Rocky Road, pecans, marshmallows, etc., for an even distribution of these added ingredients. We occasionally have mistakes like too many pecans – that’s just as wrong as not enough. Last year we donated a half-million gallons to food banks, newspapers, DJs, editors and writers like yourself because they did not meet our standards of quality. [Laughs.]”

Harrison is a born raconteur. It’s easy to see why Nestlé made him both an ice cream taster and an envoy for its products.

He finished with some good advice:

“When you buy ice cream, put it in a paper bag – plastic breathes too much,” he advises. “Roll that paper bag down and keep that ice cream cold. Go directly home. Put it on the back wall of the freezer. However, for most people, it’s been decades since they’ve seen the back wall of their freezer. [Laughs.] Just keep it away from the door – that’s the warmest place in the freezer.”

– Byron Kerman

Tags: Byron Kerman, Dierbergs Market Place, Edy’s Grand Ice Cream, ice cream, John Harrison, Nestlé Drumstick

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 5:36 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.