Peering intently into a 21/2-gallon plastic tub, college professor Robert Small takes a spatula and dribbles several generous dollops of strawberries in syrup across the bottom.
"Generally, the bottom of the tub always gets shorted," he says. "You really have to work at putting enough stuff down there for Mrs. McGillicuddy, so that there are strawberries at the bottom of the tub as well as the top."
Small flips a lever on the 20-quart Emery Thompson ice cream machine and a pale pink column cascades lazily from the machine's nozzle into the tub. Taking a spatula, he spoons fresh sour cream, brown sugar and more strawberries atop the soft-frozen ice cream, then carefully folds the mixture together until the flavorings are well distributed. "The key is not over-mixing," Small says. "That's how you get the veins of flavor."
Clearly, Small knows his ice cream, but his is more than an academic interest; two years ago he began a company called Dr. Bob's Hand Crafted Ice Creams. A 22-year veteran of Cal Poly Pomona, Small teaches wine, beer and spirits courses at the Collins School of Hospitality Management. He also heads up the annual Los Angeles County Fair Wine Competition. And he has always loved ice cream.
In particular, Small says, he loved the rich, intensely flavored ice creams he remembers from the East Coast, where he spent his post-college years. "You go through this phase as you get older when you ask yourself, 'What are the things that you regret not doing in life?"' says Small, who is 54 and holds an MBA and a doctorate in business. "I had always thought it would be the greatest thing to own an ice cream shop."
Together with friend Bill Baldwin, a partner in the Claremont residential design-build firm Hartman-Baldwin, Small started with a 1,100-square-foot manufacturing facility and Dr. Bob's dipping store in downtown Upland. Early on, Small hired George Morales as head ice cream maker, but Small himself handles recipe development and has created more than 60 ice cream, sorbet and frozen yogurt flavors, including Strawberries, Sour Cream and Brown Sugar ice cream, fashioned after the popular dessert combination and introduced this summer.
The "hand crafted" in the company name is no marketing slogan; all Dr. Bob's frozen treats are produced in small batches by hand at every step. Morales uses a chef's knife to chop the chocolate for chocolate chip ice cream, yielding bits that vary in size from grain to chunk. Flavor additions ("variegate," in ice-cream-speak) are folded in by hand. The ice cream for retail sale is all hand-packed into pint containers, making for a denser, heavier product. (The minimum 16% butterfat content also contributes some of that richness.)
