Snow King Ice Cream on Taipei City’s Wuchang Street, founded by Gao Ri-xing in 1947, today sells an incredible variety of sweet and salty ice creams.
The store today is in the hands of the third generation of the family to run it, Gao Qing-feng. He said his grandfather began selling traditional red bean and taro ice creams from a pushcart. The cold treats business was hot, but even as the number of customers grew over the years, the upswing in diabetes has meant that some people are no longer able to eat sweets.
“I can’t eat sweets. Could you make some ice cream that I could eat?" customers asked Gao Ri-xing. In 1979 Snow King made its first batch of salty ice cream, the pork floss flavor that is still on the shop’s menu today.
Gao Ri-xing’s philosophy was: “As long as it can be eaten, you can make ice cream out of it.” Although only 70-odd flavors of ice cream are on the menu today, the shop has developed more than 400 types of ice cream over the past 60 years. The creations have included sesame chicken, pumpkin, Chinese yam, scallops, bean curd and pork trotters.
A scoop of sesame chicken flavor ice cream is the product of a complex manufacturing process. First, the chicken must be deboned, then sesame oil and ginger are added. The ingredients are cooked using traditional Taiwanese recipes for the ordinary sesame chicken dish, and the final product then made into ice cream.
The pig trotter ice cream is even more difficult to make. Patrons can eat hog skin and even tendons, but because pig trotters congeal on their own, repeated adjustments need to be made for flavor. After these iterations, the final recipe is a modern version of an old favorite dish.
Snow King’s other signature dish is kaoliang liquor ice cream. Gao Qing-feng said these days it is no longer so difficult to make liquor-based ice creams, but when his grandfather was developing kaoliang ice cream back in the 1970s, it was much tougher. Alcohol freezes almost the moment it is chilled, which meant that many unsuccessful attempts were made before the process was perfected. In the 1970s and 1980s, with Taiwan’s economic boom, there were huge billboards looming over Huanhe South Road, proudly announcing: “Snow King has kaoliang ice cream!”
Although Gao Ri-xing had no training in food science, he paid his own way to Japan to learn ice-cream making. He thought about ice cream constantly. "Grandpa said he was a grassroots doctorate," Gao Qing-feng said.
Gao Ri-xing refused invitations to work as an ice cream consultant, because for him, making ice cream was not all about the money. Getting involved with a big company might mean a big payday, but it would also mean that the rich handmade flavors would be a thing of the past.
“Want to try? Peel a couple of hundred mangoes a day. You know how your hands get all itchy and turn yellow? They start looking like a couple of gigantic watermelons. Still like the feeling of making ice cream at low temperatures?” Gao Qing-feng emphasized that his family ice cream business is labor intensive, with each bowl a hard-won treat.
When a noted foreign ice cream company came to Taiwan and set up elegantly appointed chain store shops, selling dulce de leche and rum raisin ice creams, Gao Qing-feng was not in the least upset. He just kept on working with his mother and sister, in the simple little storefront, making things like mango ice cream and black lychee flavor that the chain store will never be able to match.
(This article originally appeared in The Liberty Times June 12.)