This shop in Wynwood sells salmon ice cream. You should try it. Really.
Ice cream is a frozen burst of joy in your mouth, a delight, a dream, a reminder of happier days and a promise of good times to come.
Also, now it’s made from salmon.
Yes. Dasher & Crank, Wynwood’s craft ice cream shop, is selling salmon ice cream. Not salmon flavored — ice cream made from actual salmon.
And it’s delicious.
The artisan shop is famous for wild flavors that rotate weekly. In the past, it has churned out sour cream and onion, chicken and waffles and raspberry wasabi ice cream. But salmon might be the strangest of all.
“When you have 450 flavors, you have to do some interesting things,” explains Dasher & Crank mastermind Daniel Levine.
The sustainably raised, smoked Chilean salmon comes from BluGlacier and is poached in a cream cheese-ice cream base. The original batch of ice cream Levine created included dill; the current one does not. Either, Levine says, would have paired well with Dasher & Crank’s Everything Bagel ice cream (which is currently not on the menu).
What does salmon ice cream taste like? Think savory, not sweet. This is to be expected for an ice cream shop where vanilla ranks in the bottom third of popular flavors and Ube (coconut ice cream with Filipino purple yams) is the bestseller.
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit Dasher & Crank hard as it has done to all Miami-Dade restaurants. Many decided to temporarily close; others closed for good. But Levine decided it was critical for the shop to remain open.
“Our mission statement is ‘Happiness to our community through ice cream,’ “ he says. “It’s a blow to the community to see their ice cream shop closed. It made us more determined than ever to double down on our mission and find more ways to spread happiness and levity.
“Remember, ice cream really isn’t food. You don’t eat it because you’re hungry. It’s an emotion. . . . to a kid ice cream represents the pinnacle treat. It’s the ultimate reward. As adults we tap into that nostalgia. So at Dasher & Crank we try to have fun with it. We get people laughing when they’re tasting it. We get a lot of ‘I can’t believe this is actually good.’ “
Dasher & Crank
Where: 221 NW Second Ave., Miami
Hours: 10 a.m.-11 p.m.