foodsources
premium
pints
Local company masters
the art of ice cream.
Even before fi rst taste, it is clear that husband-
and-wife-duo Joseph Chaeban and Zainab Ali
are passionate about ice cream. Behind the doors
of 390 Osborne Street, Chaeban Ice Cream offers
a level of luxe unexpected for an ice cream shop.
A white sunlit space welcomes guests, and fl ights
served on wooden boards offer an assortment of
creamy scoops. This obsession with every small
detail is what sets these artisanal pints steps above
other brands.
It starts with milk. Joseph drew on his career
as a cheesemaker to become the fi rst single-origin
ice cream maker in Canada. Similar to how
terroir infl uences wine, dairy experience taught
him that sourcing directly from one high-quality
Manitoba producer would
ensure the rich texture and
pure fl avour he wanted
for his ice cream.
“Dairy farmers are
the hardest working
people I’ve seen in
my life,” says Joseph.
“We want to put a
face to the farmer.”
He reached out to
the Dairy Farmers
of Manitoba to find
a farm he could work
with, and built a kitchen
meeting all agricultural
requirements. Within
a month, Stonewall’s
Grenkow Holstein Farms
was delivering raw milk to
pasteurize in-house.
This
c om m it ment
carries on into the mix of
8
ciao! / jun/jul / two thousand nineteen
ingredients that fl avour the ice creams. Today,
Saskatoon berries from Purple Berry Orchard,
located just outside the city, appear in pints of
“Louis Lavender”, and Bee Project Honey, a local
urban apiary, sweetens “Plain Jane” vanilla and
“Reece Piece” peanut butter.
Joseph and Zainab work tirelessly to source
the best ingredients, so maintaining authentic
fl avour is crucial. It’s diffi cult to fi nd a pint of ice
cream in a supermarket that doesn’t list additives
like di-glycerides or xanthan gum. Joseph drew
further on his dairy science background to
eliminate artificial stabilizers and emulsifiers.
Instead, ricotta and cottage cheese, packed with
protein and richness, preserve and bolster the
fl avours that are meticulously infused into every
batch, and keep Chaeban Ice Cream completely
natural.
While ice cream can technically be whipped
up in minutes, Joseph and Zainab believe in
a more refined approach. They adhere to an
extensive three-day process, preparing and
steeping fresh ingredients into a milk mixture
overnight before churning and packaging
fl avours like “Mojito Mint Patti” and “Abir Al
Sham”, a Syrian-inspired delight that uses rose
and orange blossom water. Limiting the amount
of air introduced during churning produces a
denser, richer dessert. This decreases how many
jars are made per batch, but is an important step
to creating a supremely creamy mouthfeel.
The high-quality product has quickly made
waves for the young company, which was
launched in 2017, two years after the couple
moved to Winnipeg. They fell in love with
South Osborne when community members
helped bring Zainab’s family to Canada during
By Sarah Ritchie