16 May LA Gets Sweeter with Salt & Straw Ice Cream

There is no more waiting in anticipation! Salt & Straw came to Los Angeles and continues to expand across the area, bringing us creamy, artisanal ice cream with local flavors and ingredients!! Salt & Straw is owned by cousins Tyler and Kim Malek. They started in Portland, Oregon five years ago with a push cart and today have three shops in Portland and three shops in Los Angeles – Larchmont, Abbott Kinney and Studio City and a fourth soon to open in the Arts District. The ice cream at Salt & Straw is handmade in small batches using only all natural dairy. Whether in Portland or Los Angeles, they work with the best local, organic and sustainable ingredients the respective states have to offer. And, through the flavors, Salt & Straw uses ice cream as a platform to tell the stories of the city around them. Working with local chefs, growers and producers, each flavor has a story behind it. There is a core menu of twelve flavors available at Salt & Straw and each month there are five seasonal flavors. Classic LA flavors include: Single Origin Amadeus Vanilla – made with a Ugandan vanilla bean brought to Los Angeles by Amadeus Vanilla. Stumptown Coffee & Compartes Love Notes – made with cold-brewed, Stumptown single-origin, Indonesian Sumatra coffee and Love Nuts from Los Angeles chocolatier Compartes. Black Olive Brittle & Goat Cheese – oil-cured olives from Olivos del Mar farms are made into a salty candy brittle which is then mixed into an ice cream base made using goat cheese from Cypress Grove Creamery in Arcata, CA. Honey Lavender – two pounds of California lavender flowers from Central Coast Lavender Farm and Apothecary in Paso Robles are steeped in honey and cream Almond Brittle with Salted Ganache – Grandma Malek’s almond brittle recipe and salted chocolate ganache are mixed delicious vanilla ice cream Sea Salt with Caramel Ribbons – made with Fleur de Sal that comes from salt pans in Guatemala and topped off by ribboning-in hand-burned caramel that is made in-house  Roasted Strawberry & Toasted White Chocolate – made with roasted fresh Oxnard strawberries and toasted white chocolate Salted, Malted, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough – made with the same malts that brewers use in malted ale, salty, homemade cookie dough and malted fudge swirls Chocolate Gooey Brownie – a chocolatey base made with Portland’s Holy Kakow Chocolates mixed with house-baked brownies with marshmallow fluff folded in Avocado & Strawberry Sherbet – avocado sherbet with ribbons of strawberry vanilla bean jam from Laura Ann’s Jams Freckled Woodblock Chocolate – made with Woodblock chocolate, the first bean-to-bar chocolate maker in Portland, and Jacobsen sea salt, the first to harvest salt from the Oregon coast in over 200 years, they use “freckling”, an old-school ice cream- making technique that suspends the chocolate in an untempered state Petunia’s Coconut Mint Chip Whoopie Pie – non-dairy, non-gluten, coconut based mint chip ice cream The good thing about the core menu is that if you fall in love with the big salty flakes and the smooth cookie dough in the Salted, Malted Chocolate Cookie Dough or the delicate flavors of the Roasted Strawberry & Toasted White Chocolate or the rich, gooey Chocolate Gooey Brownie, you can find it every time you go to Salt & Straw. But, if you like to mix it up, there are always new flavors to try, especially the monthly seasonal flavors. No matter what you choose, you will keep coming back because this is some of the tastiest ice cream in town. Salt & Straw Studio City: 12180 Ventura Blvd., Studio City, CA Venice Beach: 1357 Abbot Kinney Blvd, Venice, CA Los Angeles, CA: 240 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles, CA Arts District: 829 E 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA (coming soon)