Free delivery across Accra on two tubs or more
Osu, 2019 to now
How we started
Seven years, four counters and one very stubborn machine. Here is the whole thing in order, including the parts we would rather not print.
2019
The first churn
Before there was a counter
It started with a freezer that did not work
Ama Serwaa Boateng bought a second-hand batch freezer in the spring of 2019 with money that had been saved for a car. It came out of a hotel in Tema that was closing, arrived on a flatbed with a cracked paddle, and smelled faintly of onions. Her brother fixed the paddle in an afternoon. The smell took a month.
The first flavour was tigernut, because atadwe is what her grandmother soaked on the counter every Friday and because nobody in Accra was selling it frozen. Thirty tubs went to the Farmers Market on a Saturday in June. They were gone by eleven, and a woman asked whether there would be more next week.
There were. There have been every week since.
Meet the people who make it
2019 to now
Everything, in order
Seven years of it. The good decisions are in here, and so are the two we had to undo.
One machine, one flavour
A batch freezer from a closing hotel in Tema, installed in a kitchen in Osu, and thirty tubs of tigernut cream sold at the Farmers Market every Saturday until Christmas.
The year we drove
Nothing opened all season, so the ice cream went to people instead. Two riders, a cool box lashed down with inner tubes, and a delivery map drawn on the back of a calendar.
Fourteen Oxford Street
The first counter. Four flavours on the board, and a queue on the second Saturday that reached the barber's shop next door. We have not moved since.
Kwesi, and the kelewele
Kwesi Mensah came down from a pastry kitchen in Kumasi to look at the machine and stayed to run the flavours. His first was kelewele crunch. Two of us voted against it and both of us were wrong.
Milk from one farm
We stopped buying from a depot and started driving to Amasaman twice a week. It costs more, the ice cream is better, and that is the entire argument.
Lagos Avenue, and a cold van
East Legon opened in March and the van arrived in June, so a tub could reach Spintex still hard enough to argue with a spoon.
Ring Road East
Airport Residential, the third counter, and the first one drawn by somebody whose actual job it was rather than by whoever was free that week.
Adum, and a bigger room
Kumasi in February, the first Sundae sold outside Accra, and a churn room behind the Osu shop that finally holds two people at once.
2019
The year we started
4
Shops, and a van
8
Flavours on the board
120
K
Scoops last year
Nothing goes on the board because it will sell. It goes up because somebody in the kitchen will not stop talking about it.
Ama Serwaa Boateng, founder
Milk from farms we have been to
Two dairies outside Amasaman, both of which we have stood in. The milk is on our floor the next morning.
Flavours nobody else is making
Sobolo, tigernut, kelewele. Nobody was selling them as ice cream in Accra, so we started.
Churned by hand, every morning
The churn runs from five. Whatever is in the cabinet by ten was made that morning.
From the journal
Written down as it happened
Short pieces about milk, mangoes and getting a frozen thing across Accra in one piece.
A sorbet beats cream in this heat
Fat gives up before water does, which is why the sobolo gets to Adenta in one piece and the tigernut travels in a cool box.
How to feed thirty children ice cream
A birthday, a scoop cart and thirty small people with strong opinions. What we have learned about how much is enough.
Nine months looking for one mango
We tasted everything between Somanya and Techiman before a single crate of it was allowed anywhere near a tub.
It all fits in a tub
Everything above is on the board at 14 Oxford Street and in three other rooms besides. Two tubs or more and the delivery across Accra is on us.
Shop every flavour