The Sherbet Business

On Monday, June 3, I started a business.  A sherbet business.  Rhubarb sherbet, to be precise.

Sherbet brings back childhood memories of innocent summer ramblings, chasing after the ice cream truck, enjoying the surprise of creamy cold goodness emanating from the top of a push-up. For many, rhubarb has similar nostalgic qualities, associated with summer and strawberries and pie.

chopped rhubarb stalks in a pot

Personally, growing up in the South, I have no old ties to Rheum rhubarbarum, though I have enjoyed its puckering pleasure ever since moving to the North. My first house on 12th Street had a rhubarb plant  and every Spring a little old lady would come by to harvest its stalks. She said it was a particularly sweet variety of rhubarb and she'd been picking this plant for years. Honestly I didn't do much with the plant myself, not knowing much about it's qualities.

Gradually, I started experimenting with rhubarb in pies and jams, and grew to love its vibrant color, its surprising tartness, and its gelatinous mouthfeel. When we moved to Portland for six months, I missed the plant and surprised myself by buying it in the farmers market. No self-respecting northern gardener would ever buy rhubarb.   But my rental home didn't have a plant (though it did have several rosemary bushes!) so I was forced to buy rhubarb to celebrate the arrival of Spring.

I met someone yesterday from Iran who told me rhubarb was a required food to include in their New Years celebrations, which happen on the Spring Equinox.  Rhubarb stalks don't emerge in Juneau until May so she had to order some last year through the mail.

A quick visit to wikipedia reveals rhubarb's interesting history. It has been grown in China for thousands of years and came to Europe along the Silk Road. In Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo's report of his trip to Timur in Samarkand in the early 1400's, he wrote "the best of all merchandise coming to Samarkand was from China, especially silks, satins, musk, rubies, diamonds, pearls, and rhubarb..."(Wood, The Silk Road: two thousand years in the heart of Asia, 2002).

For hundreds of years, the plant has grown wild along the banks of the Volga River.  Its name comes from the Ancient Greek rha and barbarum (McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, 2004). The word rha refers both to the plant and the river, who the Scythians called Rha.  Rhubarb has been used medicinally by the Chinese for thousands of years. Rhubarb contains anthaquinones, such as emodin and rhein, which have cathartic and laxative properties (http://pharmaxchange.info/press/2012/12/pharmacognosy-of-rhubarb/).

For all of its delights, people in Juneau generally have more rhubarb than they know what to do with. The traditional strawberry rhubarb pie is more work than most people are interested in.  But several years ago, I began experimenting with a fruit sherbet recipe from Cooks Illustrated.  I adapted a recipe and came up with an extraordinary product, rhubarb sherbet.  When Juneau started a "Farmers Market" a few years ago, I thought it would be a fun project to sell sherbet cones with my daughter Celia.  We sold raspberry, blueberry, and rhubarb sherbet sporadically over two summers.  I expected the raspberry to be the big hit.  But I sold out of rhubarb every time.

ingredients: rhubarb, cream, sugar
(water & salt not pictured)

Customers have reported the sherbet is "exquisite,""bloody good," and "divine." I think it highlights the essence of rhubarb, in a refreshing and creamy experience. Last year, I toyed with the idea of opening a food truck to sell rhubarb sherbet to tourists.  Once I had been discovered, I imagined tourists (especially northern ones) coming by in droves to purchase something uniquely Juneau - where else can you buy rhubarb sherbet?  But I saw my summer vacation days evaporating before my eyes and felt that was a dream better left in my mind's eye.

rhubarb sherbet in the ice cream maker insert

Then this year, I heard our local arts council was starting a Food Truck Fridays.  They decided to move a weekly summer concert series to our arts center and have food trucks out front.  I thought this could be my chance to feed my food truck desires but keep them manageable.  It could also be a fun experience for my kids to learn about customer service and on-the-job addition and subtraction.  I talked to someone else about partnering in the operation, but that seemed too complicated for the task at hand, so I decided to go it alone.  So last Monday, I went to the State of Alaska and got a business license for a sole proprietorship, the Casey-Shattuck Sherbet Company.

my first attempt at a logo

My neighborhood is officially called the Casey-Shattuck Addition.  Because many of my neighbors are allowing me to harvest their excess rhubarb, and my neighborhood church is letting me use its DEC-approved kitchen, I thought the name fit my enterprise well. Much of the land of my neighborhood was owned by William Casey, who operated a small dairy farm here around the turn of the century.  Henry Shattuck was an insurance broker and real estate developer.  Together, they developed the Case-Shattuck subdivision, the first addition to the original Juneau Townsite (http://www.juneau.org/history/ casey.php).

Friday, June 7 was my sales debut.  I had made about four gallons of sherbet and sold it in cups and cones.  There was a man waiting for me at 4 pm, though my booth wasn't open until 4:30.  He bought six cups.   From there, it was non-stop sherbet selling, and I sold out by 6 pm!

Joe, my first customer

I'm making more next week and starting to tinker with rhubarb sorbet and rhubarb fruit leather.  We'll see where this food truck adventure leads!