EP10: Gelato for the Soul - APEM Creamery

(cars driving) (lights humming) (gentle acoustic melody) - [Jenny] You can always taste when something is just missing that one element, you don’t know what it is, that it’s missing something from the heart, it’s missing something from the soul. (violin accompaniment) So if you think you have something great, just make sure you put your heart and soul into it and do whatever you need to do to do that. (orchestral buildup) - We like to keep it interesting, so we do change the flavors around quite a bit. Just so people can come to the store every day if they wanted to and get something different. (store chatter) - [Jenny] My parents weren’t thrilled that I wanted to go into the food industry.

01:53 - I think my dad was the one that said what are you gonna do with it. But by then I think I had grew the courage to say you know what, this is just what I’m gonna do. I didn’t give them any reasons, but I still needed to finish my degree, which I did. Eventually after that I went to culinary school. That’s a big thing in Chinese culture to stand up to your parents, yeah. (dramatic atmosphere music) - [Alex] Jenny and I met at culinary school. - [Jenny] He had fancy shoes on in the kitchen which I thought was odd. We were always broken into smaller groups and the one time that I was in a group with Alex I hated working with him. I thought he was just messy or just rude. - [Alex] She has a lot of OCD. And at the time I didn’t. So it was like butting heads. - [Jenny] It wasn’t until afterwards towards the end of culinary school that we started dating. And for whatever reason we really got along and we realized that we complemented each other.

03:00 - - [Alex] We had a day where we made ice cream and sorbet. This is delicious, and then I asked them can I come in in the morning and I would make my own stuff, whatever it was, whatever. At that time I was making crazy stuff. Guinness, when people weren’t making Guinness, I was making Guinness. All that, and all of these weird flavors. Most of them sucked ‘cause I didn’t know what I was doing, but I didn’t actually think to do it. I had no clue, no idea about it. I thought if I was going to culinary school I wanted to work at a really high end place. I finished culinary school. I worked in restaurants.

03:47 - When I worked at Laboratory you start off at the bottom doing tedious things like peeling pears or washing dishes, but you should accept those and accept being good at them. You go backwards. You can’t make sorbet until you process the fruit. When you’ve peeled maybe 500 pairs then you can start making the sorbet. And then that’s how you go and then you go each step until you get to the top. And you know when you get to the top. When you know you’ve mastered as much as you could where you are.

04:18 - That’s one of the reasons why I left where I worked in New York ‘cause it was like there’s nothing left for me here. - [Jenny] He brings this creativity side to him, this uniqueness that I haven’t seen in anybody else. We fill in the blanks together. - [Alex] Jenny’s actually like the anchor ‘cause sometimes I’m very theoretical and I drift off to ideas. Jenny’s the one that keeps it grounded. And I think our personality shines through when you’re at the store, whether it’s the flavors, the quotes we put up, or just how it feels. - [Jenny] Well they’re in my home, so I wanna make sure everybody feels comfortable in my home.

05:11 - (calming mood music) - We’re at my house in Passaic. Most people are immigrants from anywhere, all over the place, and it’s always transitioned. Back in the day it was Czechs and Poles. A lot of different people from Latin America. People from Africa now, parts of the Middle East. Growing up, we always had this garden in the back. I mean it’s the garden state. That’s like, everybody should have a garden as far as I’m concerned unless you live in Jersey City. We plant mint underneath the tomato and the bean plants just ‘cause they grow wild and we use plenty of it at the store, so we just keep planting it. And using it. I bought this fig plant from my parents. And it’s actually been pretty successful. And it does produce fruit. We use it to make sorbet. And then if not, then we use the leaves to make fig leaf ice cream which is actually very very good. Has almost a coconut milky flavor. (tense atmosphere music) - [Jenny] We weren’t sure how our store was gonna be received, we weren’t sure how our ice room was gonna be received, ‘cause I know there’s quite a bit of other ice cream, frozen desserts nearby. We were also uncertain whether how people would receive different flavors every day, every week.

07:01 - And I think at the end of the day, Alex says you know, you just have to make what feels right to you. You have to push what you believe is right. We just went with it and we were pleasantly surprised with how open our customers are. And that actually drove us to do more. It pushed us because they appreciate it with open arms, and all we can do to repay them is really to push ourselves even farther. - [Alex] Last time I was like, I think I had a line up ‘til 10 o’clock just scooping like crazy and people were having fun, the music was louder, but now it’s like, when we open up it’s like we have plexiglass.

07:43 - The music can’t be as loud because there’s plexiglass. Everybody’s wearing a mask. So you can’t understand them anyway. But my mind, after a day thinking about it, was like just get in there and make it as good as you can and try to do as best you can for our customers. (music building up) The coronavirus made me kick it into another gear where we have more fun with what we make ‘cause there’s plenty of stuff I made this year that I never even made last year, but I’m trying to keep people entertained. - [Jenny] Just seeing people come in and seeing their faces light up. And when they say I’ve never been a chocolate fan and they love it. They love our chocolate.

08:44 - That really excites me, it really tells me that hey, we’re doing something right. - We’re lucky right now that we’re actually doing pretty well when we’re busy. It could have gone the other way easily to me. We just went with it. And if we fail, we fail. But to me it’s mostly the same thing. If you’re gonna fail you might as well do something good while you do it. - [Jenny] Success means that we’ve changed the way people see frozen desserts.

09:18 - I think people can require a higher quality, more creativity, that to me means we’ve changed some of these ideas and ideals of ice cream. .