Since 2019
One kitchen, ninety at a time
Marlow is eleven people, one churn and a freezer that holds four days of stock. What follows is the actual method — the temperatures, the farms, the things we have decided not to do — because a shop that says small batch and stops there has told you nothing at all.
What a week looks like
One batch, start to finish. The calendar is the constraint here — everything else on this page falls out of it.
- Thursday
The fruit is chosen
Three growers send us what they will have and at what stage. We pick on that call rather than on a plan, which is why the flavour list moves week to week and why we cannot promise you a raspberry in February.
- Monday, 6am
It arrives
Two crates and a chill box, off the back of a van. Fruit is weighed, sorted and anything bruised goes into the sorbet base the same morning. Nothing is held over to the following week — there is nowhere to hold it.
- Monday, 11am
Churn
The base has aged overnight at 4°C, which is what gives it body without a gum. It goes through the churn at −6°C in ninety-litre draws. One machine, one draw at a time, which is where the number ninety comes from.
- Tuesday
Hardening
Down to −24°C for eighteen hours in a blast cabinet. This is the step people skip and it is the one that decides texture: hardened fast, the ice crystals stay small and it eats smooth. Hardened slowly, it eats like grit.
- Wednesday
Dipping and wrapping
Chocolate at 31°C, one dip, by hand, four of us on the bench. The mochi are wrapped the same day because the dough goes stiff after about thirty hours and stops being pleasant to bite.
- Thursday, 5am
It goes
Boxes are packed in dry ice, the van does the city, and everything else is on a next-day courier by seven. Whatever is left at the end of Friday is the seconds crate, sold at the door for two euros until it is gone.
Ninety is not a marketing number. It is the size of the churn, and we only own one.
Four things we will not do
A list of values costs nothing to write. These cost us money, which is the only reason they are worth reading.
- Stabilisers and emulsifiers
- Locust bean gum would let us hold stock for a month and would make the texture more consistent than we can manage by hand. It would also flatten the fruit. The cost of refusing it is that a cup left in your freezer for six weeks is noticeably worse than one eaten this week, and we would rather tell you that than engineer around it.
- Repeating a flavour on request
- When a batch is gone it is gone, and we will not re-run it because someone liked it — including us. Lemon cheesecake has been back three times in four years, each time because the fruit came good again, and never because of an email. It is the only way the list stays honest about the season.
- A second kitchen
- We have been asked twice. Both times the sums worked and both times the answer was no, because the thing being bought would have been the name rather than the ice cream. Eleven people can watch one churn. Twenty-two cannot watch two.
- Photographing what we do not sell
- Every picture on this site is of something that has actually left the kitchen, shot on the day. No prop stylist has been near it, which is why the chocolate looks slightly uneven on the dipped edge. It is uneven.
We started because the good version existed once, in one town, and then stopped.
Iryna grew up on a sorbet made at a kiosk on the promenade that shut in 2011. Nobody wrote the recipe down. The first two years of Marlow were an attempt to get back to it from memory, and we never quite did — but the thing we arrived at instead is the reason there is a shop here.
What survived from that attempt is the rule about fruit. The kiosk bought from whoever was at the market that morning and changed the board daily. We buy from three farms and change the list weekly, which is the closest a business with a delivery van can honestly get.
- 11People in the kitchen
- 90Litres in a draw
- 3Farms we buy from
- 80+Flavours in the archive
Who is in the room
Eleven of us. These four are the ones you are most likely to end up speaking to.
Iryna
Churn and base
Ran a pastry section for nine years before this and still writes the base recipes in grams per litre on the back of the delivery notes.
Bohdan
Fruit and buying
Drives to all three farms twice a season. He is the reason we stopped buying mango through a wholesaler, which cost us four weeks of supply and was correct.
Nadia
Bench and dipping
Dips about eleven hundred lollies a week and can tell by the sound whether the chocolate has dropped below temperature. She is right more often than the probe.
Sam
Van, boxes, everything else
Packs the dry ice, does the city route, and answers the phone. If you have ever been told a flavour sold out an hour ago, it was Sam who told you.
Coming to see it
The door is open on Fridays
Two till six, no appointment. You will be handed whatever came off the bench that morning and asked what you think of it, which is not a formality.
The seconds crate is real
Misshapen dips, short-filled cups, anything that failed the look and passed the taste. Two euros each from four o’clock on Friday until it is empty.
We answer the phone ourselves
There is no queue and no ticket. If a flavour has gone we will say so rather than take the order and apologise on Tuesday.
Tell us when it was wrong
A grainy cup means the blast cabinet was crowded and we would like to know which batch. Send the date stamp from the base of the lid — that is what it is for.