Melt Bakery

As a professional pastry chef and co-owner of the ice cream sandwich company Melt Bakery, Julian Plyter, takes chocolate very, very seriously.

“I don’t eat it recreationally – only as a professional,” he says.

And in exploring the world of dark chocolate, at the rate of one high-quality bar a day, he discovered how the marriage of two flavors will, like two well-suited sweethearts, bring out the best in each other.

“Chocolate with nuts – it’s so much more than the sum of its parts,” he recalls, as he prepares circles of pumpkin ice cream, sandwiching them between gingersnap cookies in a rental kitchen on East Broadway.

From this epiphany was born the Classic, Melt Bakery’s most popular ice cream sandwich: chocolate chip walnut cookies with vanilla bean ice cream.  The day he removed the walnuts to make the Minimalist, a streamlined version of the Classic, things went awry.

“Everyone who tasted it said it was lacking something, but they couldn’t put their finger on it,” he remembers.

Plyter, 36, is a gentle giant of a man originally from Williamson, a small apple-growing town in upstate New York.  Before launching Melt Bakery, he worked at the Crosby Street Hotel and Lever House, where he developed the brown-butter bourbon shortbread that became the basis of the Belle, two of those shortbread cookies surrounding roasted white peach ice cream.  That inspired combination, as well as the Guinness, beer gelato between salted peanut butter cookies, drew the attention of media outlets like Grubstreet and Time Out New York.

Now, Melt Bakery has a rotation of at least two dozen flavors, many of which are based on seasonal produce, that he and his business partner Kareem Hamady sell each weekend at the Hester Street Fair. In developing each combination, Plyter first latches onto one element, then wanders through a lifetime of sensory experience, searching for its natural partner.

“For the Guinness, I asked myself, what goes good with beer?  Nothing goes better with beer than peanuts,” he remembers. “I almost called it ‘The Bar Snack.’”

The Guinness, initially made with gelato from Il Laborotorio del Gelato, uses a boiled-down concentrate of stout, mixed into the ice cream base. 

“It’s still got some bitterness to it,” he says, noting that it also has more female fans than male. Men, he said, pretend to think it’s cool, but then quietly ask for a Classic.

One of his very favorites was the Thai Fighter, a coconut-curry cookie with chocolate-chili ice cream.

“It was probably our most gastro-flavor,” he acknowledges. “A lot of flavor for me is about arc, and that one has a real clear transition from flavor to flavor.  You get the curry right out of the gate, then it goes to chocolate, then coconut, with the chili coming in at the end.”

On a chilly fall day, customers still lined up for that day’s specials, including the Morticia, a deep chocolate cookie with malted chocolate rum ice cream, and a duo of new fried pies (apple and pumpkin) that Plyter developed for autumn. 

As Plyter watched Hamady fry pies and chat with their regulars, some of whom had come from the Upper East Side and farther afield to get their last fix of the season and bid him and Kareem farewell, he recounted a few other winning combinations. The Kareem, named for his Lebanese partner, featured a homemade baklava with pistachio gelato (the baklava was “insanely good,” he says); the Marcel, a madeleine with Earl Grey tea ice cream. 

“I like to think of things that are cookie-like,” he says, “Other things apart from just little round cookies.”

Surprisingly, none of his combinations have so far ended in divorce, unlike the one out of two American marriages that do. Perhaps it’s that something extra he puts in that gives the unions their staying power.

“I really do think that love is an ingredient,” he says.