Hannah Ziskin Screams for Ice Cream
The pastry chef and co-owner of Quarter Sheets might be better known for princess cake and fruit pie, but ice cream is her true love.
Photographs by David Gurzhiev
Those who’ve been tracking the ascent of Hannah Ziskin, the zesty, whip-smart pastry chef whose princess and slab cakes have catapulted her to national fame as the co-owner of the Echo Park pizzeria Quarter Sheets, might be aware of her open secret. That is, she doesn’t have a sweet tooth. “I’m not a huge dessert person,” she told me in an interview for TASTE in 2022. When I sat down with her for this story, she made the proclamation again, but this time, it was in the context of an exception: ice cream. “It’s really one of the only desserts I like to eat and crave,” Ziskin says. “On my day off, the only thing I want is a soft serve cone.”
Ziskin, who was born and raised in Los Angeles and readily admits her physical resemblance to a young Dave Grohl, favors a classic vanilla bean ice cream the most and loves a scoop of Earl Grey. She grew up on Baskin Robbins’ Gold Medal Ribbon and Quarterback Crunch, orders butter pecan at Thrifty’s, and stocks Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia at home in Glendale, where she lives with Aaron Lindell, her partner in life and Quarter Sheets. While working at Nopa in San Francisco, she would bike home to the Mission District, often stopping by Garden Creamery for two scoops, like genmaicha and mint-chip.
It checks out, then, that ice cream is also Ziskin’s favorite dessert to create. “Aaron became known for doing pizza, and I do cake, but I never really ‘did cake,’ it just sort of happened,” she says of her reputation at Quarter Sheets. “Ice cream is my true love thing that I love to eat and to make, and that’s sort of the secret star.” At the restaurant, she serves it in many forms depending on the season and her whims, including two flavors paired in a coupe, fruit pie à la mode, slabs of rainbow sherbet, and semifreddo sandwiched between two brown butter cookies, the latter of which was dreamt up by her pastry sous chef Krista Hernandez.
As is the case with most beloved foods, Ziskin’s predilection for the cold, creamy treat stems from nostalgia. Specifically, for homemade peach ice cream churned on the back porch of her childhood home in the summertime. “My mom was not a big baker, but she and my aunt Leslie always made vanilla ice cream and peach ice cream,” she recalls. “She had one of those [machines] that looks like a barrel. You put rock salt and ice around the outside, then insert this metal cylinder, and it spins, and it was super loud. We would always give the beater to my dog Basho, a Rhodesian Ridgeback, and he’d lick it.”
This evocative memory proved a rightful introduction to a career anchored by highly seasonal, fruit-forward ice cream. Ziskin learned how to make ice cream professionally while working as an intern at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. “That was one of the few jobs I was allowed to do from start to finish,” she says. There were no cheffy tricks to making ice cream at Alice Waters’ mecca for local, seasonal ingredients cooked simply—just milk, cream, eggs, sugar, salt, and natural flavorings like fruit, nuts, and chocolate. At her next gig as the main pastry production cook for San Francisco sister restaurants Cotogna and Quince, Ziskin honed her chops in ice cream wizardry. There, she had free rein to make whatever flavors she wanted to pair with Cotogna’s seasonal fruit crostatas. At the same time, she learned how to utilize alternative sugars and stabilizers like glucose in the fine dining kitchen at Quince. “I just started experimenting, and that’s really fun to do on someone else’s dime,” she says, laughing. “Thanks Michael Tusk!”
One of the techniques Ziskin mastered at Cotogna and Quince was to make ice cream extra rich and creamy by infusing something glutinous into the base. That led to one of her proudest inventions to date: rye bread ice cream. To make it, she infuses toasted rye bread overnight in a base with brown sugar and additional caraway. “It makes this super silky, thick, wonderful base that I’ve been using ever since,” Ziskin says. While brown bread ice cream is common in Ireland, the Irish version is made by folding breadcrumbs through vanilla ice cream, not by infusing bread in the base (a fact I can confirm in JR Ryall’s Ballymaloe Desserts cookbook, page 202). Years later, as the pastry chef at L.A.’s now-closed M. Georgina, Ziskin used the same technique to make sourdough ice cream from surplus bread. “It almost tastes like buttered brioche ice cream, even though there’s no butter in the bread, and it has a little tang to it,” she says. “And it comes full circle; you eat the bread at the beginning of the meal, and then you eat bread ice cream at the end.”
After Ziskin and Lindell took Quarter Sheets from a cake and pizza pop-up to a brick-and-mortar restaurant in late 2021, it took some time to fine-tune the ice cream program. They didn’t have an ice cream machine for the entire first year, so they resorted to semifreddo set in sheet pan risers, portioned into sticks, and topped with fruit. When her Musso machine arrived last fall, Ziskin began making seasonal scoops to serve alongside slices of cake and pie. Then she bought stainless steel ice cream coupes, and things started to take off. “You can create a whole dessert out of two scoops of ice cream if the flavors sing together, maybe a cookie that goes with it,” she says. She’s paired lemon verbena stracciatella with strawberry, for example, and collaborated with Hernandez on a ras el hanout ice cream (rich, creamy, spice-forward) to go with a mandarinquat sherbet (punchy, acidic). “I try to take the same care in those ice cream coupes that I do in any other plated dessert application,” she says. “You know [when] you go to an ice cream shop with a chaotic person and they get two flavors, like mint chip and cinnamon, and you’re like, ‘Bro, what the…?’ I’m like, ‘No, no, no. You have to think about the experience of eating through the cone.’”
As an ice cream maker, Ziskin tends towards pure flavors that taste like the best version of peak-season fruit. “I’m not going to use shit strawberries to make strawberry ice cream, I’m going to wait for them to be perfect,” she says. And lately, on account of Hernandez’s influence, she’s leaning more into ripples, like in a vanilla bean ice cream studded with chopped candied kumquat and stone fruit pie served with a scoop of sour cherry rippled crème fraîche ice cream.
“It’s just the perfect thing. It’s not too heavy, you can eat the whole thing. If I want to send a gift, I’ll always send ice cream.”
For better or worse, housemade ice cream is often overlooked on dessert menus. Why get the ice cream coupe when you could have a slice of gooey stone fruit crumble-topped pie or a hefty slab of Gateau Dirt, Ziskin’s elevated take on a dirt cake? It’s a fair question, and one that Ziskin has a good answer for: “It’s just the perfect thing. It’s not too heavy, you can eat the whole thing. If I want to send a gift, I’ll always send ice cream. They’ll be like, ‘We’re so full, we can’t eat dessert,’ but I know you can eat this. After a big, heavy meal of pizza, I just want to be sure that people eat dessert, too. And if you have an ice cream offering on the menu, it’s something that lightens instead of depresses your stomach at the end.”
Yet ice cream, even if housemade, is not always worth ordering at a restaurant. “Aaron and I joke about when you see a certain dessert menu, there are things on there that will tell you that there’s no pastry chef: crème brûlée, panna cotta, Basque cheesecake,” Ziskin says. “And then you have housemade ice cream, which I’ve seen at a few places that I know don’t have a pastry chef. While the flavor can be good, it’s actually really hard to make good ice cream [on a textural level]. It requires a lot of understanding, time, and care.”
As we enter late summer, pluot ice cream may come into play at Quarter Sheets. And with fall around the corner, we can look forward to Ziskin’s Warren pear buttermilk sherbet, a riff on a Courtney Burns recipe from her time working at the Bay Area’s storied Bar Tartine. But currently, it’s Ziskin’s sentimental peach ice cream that perfectly encapsulates her commitment to the craft. She makes two bases—dairy infused with peach leaves foraged in Alhambra and a sorbet that balances roasted peaches with fresh—combines them at a ratio of 60 to 40 percent, then lightly macerates more peaches to add into the ice cream machine at the end of the spin cycle. “So you have [peach] in four ways, and that peach leaf adds a background, mysterious almond flavor that really amps up the peach,” she explains. It’s paired with a peach granita, showered in sourdough breadcrumbs, and topped with grassy olive oil and finishing salt. The dessert is creamy and acidic, frosty-flakey, crispy-crunchy, and intensely peachy all at once. It’s easily one of the best stone fruit dishes in Los Angeles right now. One bite, and you’ll know that a pastry chef made it, without a doubt.
An absolute perfect read from start to finish. A young Dave Grohl and chaotic friends who love sacrilegious ice cream flavor combos? This is gold.
She’s so brilliant!