Salt & Straw Launches Vault Series In Honor Of Its 12th Birthday

In honor of Salt & Straw’s 12th birthday on April 22nd, the beloved ice cream brand has announced the release of its Vault Series. Available for the entire month of April, this series features five flavors that co-founder and ice cream innovator Tyler Malek say represent important moments and milestones throughout Salt & Straw’s journey.

From a pushcart in Portland, Oregon to a nationally known brand with scoop shops all along the west coast and a few in Florida, specialty flavors rotate each month and 13 classic flavors are available regularly at each shop and online for nationwide shipping.

In just over a decade, Tyler has created more than 1,200 recipes — each with its own special story and inspiration using tons of artisan ingredients from small businesses all over the country that he and his team have hand-selected and worked hard to honor.

Along that same note, the Vault Series flavors hone in on that same ethos and range from chocolatey and sweet to slightly savory and unexpected.

The flavors are in this month’s series are:

• Black Olive Brittle & Goat Cheese — This was the first flavor to debut in Los Angeles when Salt & Straw made its way to the City of Angels. Shards of sweet-and-salty butter brittle made from cured black olives are mixed into a creamy cave-aged goat cheese ice cream created in partnership with California’s Cypress Grove Creamery.
• Honey Marshmallow Rocky Road — This flavor first appeared in 2012 as a riff on a classic favorite paying homage to the Pacific Northwest featuring fresh honey from Jacobsen, cooked down and whipped into gobs of pillowy marshmallow, then carefully folded into chocolate ice cream spiced with cinnamon and ancho chili with a fun crunch thanks to candied hazelnuts mixed throughout.
• Sweet Corn and Waffle Cones — This one was created in collaboration with chef April Bloomfield, featuring fresh golden corn, torched until charred and roasty, then tossed into a corn flavored ice cream wrapped in ribbons of brown butter caramel with bite-sized bits of chocolate-covered waffle cone.
• Strawberry Cilantro Lime Cheesecake — This flavor was part of the first ever summer berries series, and it features toasty graham cracker crust that’s folded into strawberry ice cream, then adorned with a ribbon of cilantro lime cheesecake for a zesty finish.
• Mango Habanero IPA Sorbet — This vegan flavor is crafted to be as quenching as cracking open a cold beer, the flavor features Laces IPA from Miami’s Wynwood Brewing spun until frozen then spiced with fresh habanero, mangoes, and citrus.

As a big fan of Salt & Straw, I jumped at the chance to chat with co-founder Tyler Malek about how the brand has grown, what the thought process has been behind some of his flavors, and what goes on in his creation kitchen.

Amber Love Bond: 12 years! That’s so impressive! Did you have any idea Salt & Straw would become such a beloved brand across the entire country?

Tyler Malek: When we first started as a pushcart in Portland, Oregon, we dreamed of being a community gathering spot where people could run into their friends and neighbors. Right off the bat, our ice cream became a platform for us to collaborate with culinary partners, support local artisans, and highlight important issues to us. We bring this ethos to each of the cities we scoop in, in an effort to reflect and uplift the local communities. For example, you’ll see Roasted Pineapple Coconut Sherbet on our Miami menu, while we pay homage to local Oregon berries on our West Coast menus with Marionberry Coconut Sherbet. So we’re honored that this dream we had 12 years ago continues to resonate with our communities to this day.

ALB: What were some of the first flavors you developed and are they still in the rotation?

TM: Sea Salt with Caramel Ribbons is one of the first flavors we ever created, and is such a good archetype to our style of ice cream. When crafting this flavor, our goal was to figure out how to perfect this classic combination through our Salt & Straw lens. That meant adding salt into our sweet cream ice cream and delicately burning the caramel so it has a rich, bitter bite. Another is Strawberry Honey Balsamic with Black Pepper, a classic combination for thousands of years, where we put our spin on it by using honey infused balsamic vinegar.

ALB: You’ve got roughly a dozen on The Classics menu that are served all year, was there a moment along the line that you were like “yes, this is exactly what I’m envisioning” regarding those offerings?

TM: We’ve challenged ourselves a lot over the last few years to figure out what the purpose of our Classics menu is and have realized that it’s not meant to be the best hits. If that were the case, it’d be 10 different variations of cookie dough ice creams. Our Classics menu is meant to represent the breadth of ingredients and flavors that we work with and showcase the dynamic way those all play together. So even in our Salted, Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough flavor, we add extra salt and incorporate brewers malt to give it our own spin and reflect our culinary style.

ALB: Previously, you’ve talked about the development of the recipe for the brownies in the Chocolate Gooey Brownie (my favorite flavor!!!) was a process to get just the right consistency as the ice cream tempers — is there another flavor that involved an ingredient that stands out like that?

TM: When you actually take a step in our kitchen, it’s predominantly a baking and candy making factory over anything else. Our team is baking things from scratch by hand every day to be perfect for ice cream making. That means baking, caramelizing, or crushing ingredients at different temperatures and in different shapes so they maintain their texture when frozen. There is a lot of science behind it. In our Black Olive Brittle & Goat Cheese flavor available in our April Vault Series, we faced a challenge to keep our brittle from melting once it was churned into the ice cream. So we have a little trick to coat our brittle in fat—coconut oil in this case— to give it a barrier that protects it from melting. Over the past 12 years, we’ve learned lots of food science tricks like this to preserve the quality and texture of our ingredients.

ALB: You’ve dreamt up 1,200 ice cream flavors — how many have made it to the menus over the years and do you ever go back to ideas and revamp them?

TM: It’s so hard to say! For every flavor of ice cream that makes it on our menu, there are 10 other iterations that were failures. Our goal in our R&D lab is to fail often, so we make a lot of bad ice cream that always leads to success. Over the last 12 years, I’ve probably tasted around 12,000 ice creams, which means we have a catalog of flavors with different techniques and flavor profiles we can pull from. For example, we’ve dialed in a marshmallow fluff recipe that we revamp by replacing sugar with honey or whipping in fresh lemon zest to give it a lemon meringue flavor. Our April Vault Series is dedicated to bringing back these iconic flavors that have marked key milestones throughout the Salt & Straw journey, so it’s always a month of nostalgia for me to see where we’ve come from and where we’re going.

ALB: There’s Salt & Straw shops along the west coast and then a few Disney World and two in Miami (lucky me!), where else do you hope to open scoop shops and are any in the works?

TM: This year we’re really focused on our Miami and California communities. We opened our Miami shops in February of 2021 when COVID was at its peak, so we’re building back our momentum and looking forward to connecting with those communities and experimenting with more flavor offerings there, starting with our shop opening on Lincoln Road this summer.

ALB: Finally, what’s one piece of advice you would give yourself if you were talking to Tyler of 12 years ago just beginning this journey?

TM: When my cousin Kim and I were first starting out, we had a certain kind of naivety that I think was necessary when you’re taking a big leap like that. Had I known how hard it would be and how many things could go wrong, I don’t think I would have gotten to this point so I wouldn’t say anything. Except maybe not serve Berries, Beans, and BBQ Sauce ice cream.

Available now through the end of April, indulge in the Vault Series at all Salt & Straw scoop shop locations and via nationwide shipping.