Rich, creamy grand champion creation

CHETEK, Wis. — Alan Kurschner’s story is not the story of a typical champion — with years of practice and building a foundation. Instead, enthusiasm and dedication prevailed when Kurschner’s Super Premium Ice Cream won the World Dairy Expo Championship Dairy Product Contest as they were preparing to celebrate the company’s first anniversary.

Kurschner embarked on his ice cream-making journey just over three years ago. After spending two years learning the foundation of his newly chosen trade, the Kurschner family opened the doors to their store last September.

Less than a year into the venture, Kurschner entered the Expo contest, sponsored by the Wisconsin Dairy Products Association, just to see how his ice cream compared to that of his peers. He said he never expected to walk away with ribbons and awards galore — including the overall grand champion ice cream.

“The night I found out we won the grand championship, I called my wife in disbelief,” Kurschner said. “I asked if she realized that just a year ago, I was still experimenting with flavors on our kitchen table with her Cuisinart.”

Kurschner entered 10 of his ice cream flavors.

“I’m really big on always improving,” Kurschner said. “I was hoping to have one or two make the top three — to be able to say to myself, ‘Yeah, I’m on the right track.’”

He said he was unprepared for the news he would receive from the phone call from Amy Winters, WDPA executive director. The news was a fourth place finish in the ice cream with nuts category with his pistachio ice cream; second place in the open class with his lemon poppy seed ice cream; first in the regular vanilla category with his Madagascar-Indonesian vanilla; and also first place in the peanut butter chocolate ice cream category with his peanut butter chocolate ice cream, which was the judge’s selection for the overall grand champion ice cream.

“I was ecstatic,” Kurschner said. “You’re going up with all these other ice creams, submitted from all around the country. To have one of my ice creams selected as the overall grand champion, from all those winners, it was just amazing.”

Kurschner’s championship ice cream was a new addition to his repertoire.

“The peanut butter chocolate was a recipe I was just developing right before I sent the contest entries,” Kurschner said. “It just happened that it was the most-requested flavor people were asking for. Then as I was working on it, I realized it was a category in the contest. I thought it was great timing; I could just make another batch and submit it.”

Becoming an ice cream chef was not originally in the plans for Kurschner, who holds a doctorate in biblical studies and previously worked in academia.

“I’ve always been an ice cream connoisseur — I say connoisseur, but it’s really more of an ice cream snob,” Kurschner said. “I was just a little disappointed in some of the more highly processed ice cream out there, and all of the artificial additives and so forth.”

A visit to an ice cream shop with his son, Andrew, which Kurschner described as disappointing, became the turning point in his life that he was not expecting.

“As we were walking out, I turned around and saw a lot of people walking in,” Kurschner said. “I thought, ‘Wow, people are paying all this money for this ice cream, when they could have higher quality.’ As we were walking to my vehicle, I told Andrew that we were going to start our own ice cream-making business. That might have been a mistake, because my wheels started turning, and that’s not always a good thing.”

While he was not raised on a dairy farm, Kurschner relied on his father’s upbringing on a Barron County dairy farm as his inspiration in his pursuit of creating ice cream that met his standards.

Kurschner attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s ice cream short course as well as Scoop School in St. Louis, Missouri, before beginning to outfit his shop and develop his recipes. Maintaining the highest quality in his product was always paramount, Kurschner said, including never using artificial dyes.

“We use a clean dairy mix; we use pure cane sugar as our sweetener — no corn syrup,” Kurschner said.

The mix Kurschner uses is 16% butterfat, with a lower overrun than the average ice cream, which is the basis for the super-premium label.

“It’s a nice, very dense and creamy ice cream,” Kurschner said. “You don’t need as much to feel satiated.”

The higher butterfat makes developing flavors a little trickier, Kurschner said.

“There are a lot of variables, I spend time dialing them in to exactly what I want,” Kurschner said. “Because I’m using the 16% butterfat mix, it can impede the flavor; you have to use more flavoring for it to punch through the butterfat, without making it too intense.”

At any given time, Kurschner has 16 flavors to offer to his customers — a few standards and some specialties and seasonal flavors that he rotates in and out of stock. Besides serving cones and dishes, he retails half gallons of certain flavors as well. In total, Kurschner estimates he has developed nearly 40 recipes in his year of making ice cream.

Kurschner said his newly chosen career brings him full circle, bringing locally made hard ice cream back to Barron County.

“I grew up loving ice cream,” Kurschner said. “As an adult, I thought ice cream should be better; it should feel like an indulgence, that was my goal. Our motto is ‘Wisconsin ice cream, at its best.’ That’s on all our branding and labeling. I think we proved that with the grand champion selection.”