Fancy A Jalapeño Peach Ice Cream? This Fredericton Entrepreneur Offers Unique Flavours
FREDERICTON – With summer in full swing and +25 temperatures, ice cream is a must-have season snack. A Fredericton-based entrepreneur offers flavours that you’ve probably never seen before – including jalapeño peach.
Yes, you read it right.
Saba Morales started making ice cream about two years ago when her daughter was born. She didn’t want her daughter to have something with fats and artificial flavours, so she mixed some coconut cream, a little bit of maple syrup, pistachio crumbles and blueberries.
“It was so good and she loved it, so I said ‘I’m sure I can make other flavours,’” said Morales.
She started making more ice cream and sharing it with her family and friends. One of her friends convinced her to have a booth at the Garrison Night Market: “Saba’s Ice creams and Paletas (popsicles).”
Morales offers flavours for different palates, including include chili chocolate, raspberry and basil, peach honey chamomile, among others. She says it’s been fun coming up with the menu.
She gets inspired by recipes she finds online and trips throughout Europe that she did while growing up.
“The food there is completely different…their strawberry tastes like strawberry or the raspberry sorbets taste like raspberry, and I just wanted to bring a little bit of that here,” she said. “It’s because I really enjoy it too, and I thought ‘I can’t be the only one.’ Apparently, I’m not.”
In a previous interview with Huddle, Morales said that what makes her ice cream and paletas special is that they can’t be found anywhere else.
“I may be a little bit successful if I did your cotton-candy and your vanilla, and your basic chocolate, which are delicious…but I think people want to have something different than what they can get at the store,” she said.
Even if her products contain sugar, they don’t have artificial preservatives. Morales says she makes her treats with ingredients that someone would have lying around the kitchen and whose words can be pronounced.
“If it’s strawberry it’s real strawberry, if it’s blueberry, it’s real blueberry, if it’s coffee it’s coffee that’s in there, if it’s lemon, that’s me squeezing the lemons,” she said.
It takes her a couple of days to make the ice cream. She makes the custards in one day and turns all of them in the next few days.
Morales grows some of the ingredients in her garden and tries to shop local as much as possible.
She says people in the community have responded well to her product. Her best-sellers are coffee – for ice cream – and chocolate-dipped raspberry and chocolate raspberry for popsicles.
“One night, I had one customer come back three times,” she said.
Morales’ products have become more well-known since the start of the market. Before the market, she says, only her friends knew about her.
“Nobody knew who I was before,” she said. “I definitely met a whole bunch of new people, and getting to know my regular customer’s names.”
In the winter, Morales will keep her business a little more low-key, as she goes back to her high school teaching job and giving Latin Dance lessons with her husband.
Morales has had a positive experience, despite the fact it rained during the first two weeks of the market.
“I kind of thought ‘oh, maybe it’s me bringing the rain,’” she joked.
She says the challenging part is juggling the business and being at home with her kids, “which is a full time job in it of itself.”
“I’m up every night until midnight, one o’clock working and then the kids are up at six o’clock,” she said.
She’s thinking of making sriracha ice cream, but maybe not this year.
You can try Morales’ products every Thursday at the Garrison Night Market. She will also be part of Riverview’s Orchard Fair in September, depending on the weather.