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Restaurant
has the scoop on chocolate malts
Aug.
8, 2006
| If
You Go |
Name: The Downsville Coffee House and Restaurant.
Address: E4507 Highway C.
Established: December 2004.
Owners-operators: Diane and Alan Yahnke.
Telephone: (715) 664-8155.
Hours: 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through
Thursday; 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday;
8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday; closed Monday.
Prices: 22-ounce malts, $3.95.
Wheelchair accessible: No.
Other: Other fountain drinks; homey
cooking; BLTs with shoulder bacon from Downsville
Meat Processors; pies and cookies.
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Good
chocolate malts — or malteds, as they say east
of Lake Michigan — are darn hard to find these
days.
Maybe that’s because everywhere we turn —
ice cream shops, cookbooks, Web sites — we’re
told that malt aficionados think chocolate malts
are best made with vanilla ice cream.
In a Chippewa Falls scoop shop recently, we
watched such a malt being made: white milk,
vanilla ice cream and some chocolate-flavored malted
milk powder, all blended
and served in Styrofoam.
The result tasted of malt — kind of —
but not at all of chocolate. At least it wasn’t
made from soft-serve.
Most malt aficionados “chocolatize” their
vanilla ice-cream malts with chocolate-flavored
syrup. That’s better than using
just chocolate malt powder.
But adding more than a dollop of syrup makes a malt
too sweet, until syrupy sweetness is all you can
taste.
Alan
Yahnke makes world-class malts, partly
because he insists that chocolate malts must taste
of malt and chocolate.
Yahnke
crafts each malt with 1 percent white milk, creamy
white Carnation malt powder — voted Best Tasting
by American Culinary Chefs Best — and massive
slabs of Cedar Crest chocolate ice cream from Manitowoc,
which won Best Chocolate Ice Cream at the 2004 World
Dairy Expo.
Instead of a milk shake machine, Yahnke uses a powerful
Vita-Mix commercial blender with a big tamper. The
tamper is key. Reluctant scoops of ice cream can
be mashed into the blender blades
quickly, reducing total blending time and therefore
making a perfect malt texture possible: smooth,
creamy, dense, soft, silken.
Yahnke knows just when to quit blending. He serves
his masterpieces in chilled tall tumblers of heavy
glass.
For the toastiest malty taste, ask him to add extra
malt powder before mixing. The friend and malt maven
who told us first of Yahnke’s genius called
his chocolate malts “the best I’ve found
in 25 years.”
We’ll slurp to that.
Main
Course, the Leader-Telegram's restaurant review
column, runs the fourth Sunday of the month. Diners'
Notebook, a sampling of favorite restaurant offerings,
runs the second Tuesday of the month.
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