At first, Yesenia Castañon, the pastry chef at French restaurant JouJou, just liked the sound of “Sunday Sundae.” Now, this once-weekly special has become a canvas for peak summer produce and an unimaginable number of whipped toppings.
Brown butter ice cream, locally-grown cherries, toasted canelés, and thyme chantilly. Fennel pollen ice cream, raspberry pink peppercorn sorbet, and Chartreuse chantilly. Fromage blanc ice cream, olallieberries three ways (fresh, jammed, and preserved), lemon verbena, and brown sugar meringue. These are just a few of the creations Castañon has dreamt up week after week, all piled high in a shining stainless steel ice cream cup.
“I've been having a lot of fun with the versatility,” she said. “I think ice cream translates very well to what you have available.”
JouJou is the latest concept from David Barzelay of the two-Michelin-starred Lazy Bear and cocktail destination True Laurel. Barzelay and partner Colleen Booth opened the Design District restaurant in March. (San Francisco Chronicle food critic Cesar Hernandez didn’t have many nice things to say about it, but then again, he didn’t get a sundae.)
Castañon, who has worked in the kitchens of Gary Danko, Spruce, and most recently, as chef de cuisine at Birdsong, has added bits and bobs of any given week’s dessert menu to her sundaes, which includes cookies, cakes, and brioche. However, the star of the show is whatever seasonal produce calls to her.
“I take the time to go to the market and see my farmers that I love,” she said. With a brand new recipe every week, Castañon tries to find whatever produce is perfectly ripe and in its prime to feature for a sundae. She’ll go so far as to text farmers about the status of their melons or prod growers on the correct timing for special ingredients. “That's been really fun, to see the progression. You may see figs one week and they're not great but the next week they're perfect and you have to use them.”
Castañon makes the ice cream herself at Lazy Bear every week. While she has a reliable crème anglaise ice cream base that has proven to be quite versatile through the sundae series, she’s not afraid to step away from it if the fruit (or vegetable) du semaine calls for it.
Her sundae formula also changes. “I'm not trying to stick with having a sauce, something crunchy, and something smooth every time,” she said. However, there’s one component she’s loyal to: “I do always try to hit something creamy, like a pastry cream, crème diplomat, or a whipped cream. That feels very sundae to me.”
Inspiration in the name of seasonal produce and pastry cream has led her to some interesting creations. A few Sundays ago, she served a sundae of sungold tomatoes, citrus marigold semifreddo, basil crème diplomat, and vanilla ice cream with a generous pour of strawberry-tomato sauce on top.
“Honestly, the tomato, I was on the fence about it,” Castañon said. For folks coming to dine on traditional French food, “I wondered, is it too weird for our clientele?” Evidently, after tasting a trial, the restaurant staff encouraged it, and the sundae was a hit. Then again, it’s hard to imagine fresh scoops of ice cream, sweet, gooey sauce, peak produce, and a dollop of cream as being anything but a hit. Besides, ice cream is never out of style or place these days, even in fine dining.
Plus, by now, the sundaes have superseded their French bistro context. There are some loyalists who come to the restaurant only for the week’s unique ice cream creation at $18 apiece.
Castañon has incorporated some surprising ingredients: Humboldt Fog cheese, wine grapes, fennel pollen, the anise hyssop flower, Chartreuse liqueur, and masa, to name a few. But her favorite ingredient thus far is melon, which she featured multiple times over in the same sundae a few weeks back: atlantis melon sorbet, lightly whipped cream flavored with lemon verbena and mint, fresh ocelot watermelon, piel de sapo, ambrosia melon, and Chartreuse pâte de fruit.
Her track record of thinking outside the box has emboldened some of her regulars to make requests for similarly uncommon sundae ingredients, such as for the sweet Italian frying peppers known as Jimmy Nardellos.
“I'm going to have to really think about that one,” Castañon said. “At least the season is long enough for me to play with it for a while.” Sometimes, like the Jimmy Nardello ice cream-to-come, she mulls over a recipe for weeks and waits for the perfect time to strike. Other weeks, she’ll be at the Saturday farmers market, still searching for prime ingredients to light the way the day prior.
The creative juices this requires have yet to deplete. Castañon said: “I've been really romanticizing these sundaes.”
