10 Eye-Opening Facts About Salt & Straw

If you can learn how to make ice cream at its finest, you can learn to make it at its "funnest." This is the thesis, the joie de vivre behind Salt & Straw, an iconic Portland-based ice cream shop that has set the standard for flavor innovation in ice cream. Tyler Malek and Kim Malek, cousins and co-founders of Salt & Straw, have set out to make sure that anyone who has a desire to make a really good ice cream at home can do just that. 

With the release of the brand's latest cookbook, "America's Most Iconic Ice Creams: A Salt & Straw Cookbook" by Tyler Malek and JJ Goode, the foundation on which Salt & Straw has built its flavor kingdom is the focus. Once you master these 10 iconic flavors, you can start to go off-book and have fun. You can build "flavor trinities," as Tyler describes them, and let creativity be your guide.

You may be familiar with Salt & Straw as an innovative ice cream shop with unique flavors, but if you really want to get to know this brand, we're here to give you the (ice cream) scoop. I had the opportunity to chat with Tyler about Salt & Straw, the new cookbook, flavor successes and flops, and his deep connection to all things Portland. Make yourself a bowl of salted, malted, chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and tuck in for these 10 eye-opening, thought-provoking, and delicious facts about Salt & Straw you probably didn't know.

"Long before Salt & Straw was the biggest small batch ice cream company in the world, it was just twenty-three-year-old me, my brilliant cousin Kim, and an erratic freezer in Portland, Oregon," writes Tyler Malek in the intro to the new cookbook. "Then a cup of coffee changed everything." What started as a desire to work at his cousin's future ice cream shop quickly turned into a deep curiosity for flavors. As Tyler was in the midst of quitting his job and working towards being an ice cream maker, his time spent around baristas and coffee experts at Stumptown's The Annex — learning about the many nuances of coffee tasting and what goes into discerning the different flavors in each cup — got him on the path towards ice cream enlightenment.

"Over the course of a year, I tasted more than one hundred different coffee beans, many of them brewed in multiple ways," writes Tyler. "It's hard to explain how profoundly this experience affected me."

Tyler's innovative ideas were only the beginning. By becoming more knowledgeable on all aspects of ingredients, from the power of salt to what happens when you combine chocolate and coffee, his vision became more focused. Today, Tyler and Kim are still best friends, and still run the business together, making every ice cream in their 28,000 square foot kitchen in Portland.

If you've ever had the opportunity to look at the Salt & Straw ice cream menu, you know the flavors are as indulgent as they are unique. Tyler Malek and his team of ice cream chefs are creating flavor combinations that reach outside of the norm and give new meaning to thinking creatively. However, these mind-blowing flavors didn't just appear out of thin air. They're a result of a foundation of flavors that already exists, and using those building blocks to create new combinations.

"If you can start with the 10 basics, the 10 iconic recipes, then you will know how to make ice cream," said Tyler. "You can make any recipe from there. You'll also know the science of how to dream up your own ice cream flavors."

The new cookbook is entirely focused on these 10 iconic flavors, without which Salt & Straw wouldn't have the innovative menu it has become known for. The flavors are vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, coffee, green tea, pistachio, cookie dough, salted caramel, cereal, and rum raisin, and whether you're an ice cream enthusiast or even just the occasional dabbler, you've probably come in contact with one or all of these flavors at least once.

"For us, there is an intense level of curiosity in our innovation process," Tyler Malek says. "In my opinion, that's the leader for everything we do ... we think of our menu as a monthly periodical that's coming out, and the cover story is the menu."

The rotating menu, which features five new flavors every month, is a big part of what sets the brand apart — its "secret sauce." Inspired by fine dining restaurants from Portland to New York City, Tyler saw a rotating menu as an incredible opportunity to show off who Salt & Straw is as a company and bring customers along with them for the ride. 14 years later, it's officially become hard-wired into the Salt & Straw DNA. While the flavors rotate monthly, they do stick to a calendar of sorts, with monthly themes like chocolatiers for February and berries for July.

When Tyler says the menu changes every month, he means it. The monthly cadence of previewing flavors on Thursday night and launching on Friday morning became something Tyler and his team fell in love with, and now customers will line up on Friday mornings — also known as launch Friday — to be the first to taste something new. Additionally, tasting events and midnight tastings for certain menus have become part of the norm, and if you're part of the Salt & Straw email list, you too can be a part of the new flavor madness.

In Washington County, Oregon, where Tyler Malek lives, one in five children is considered malnourished. It's a statistic that, while it's hard to talk about, makes him such an advocate for education and food access. Tyler has made projects with local organizations and giveback campaigns with different community groups a pillar of the Salt & Straw brand.

In 2023, Salt & Straw kicked off its partnership with Project LEDO, a non-profit that works with underfunded schools around STEM exercises, using ice cream as a way to connect students to food science and marketing. By using ice cream as a way to create a dialogue and connect the dots, kids and adults alike are able to acknowledge difficult subject matter while also working towards ways to fix real problems. One company, Urban Gleaners, which Tyler has been on the board of directors of for eight years, hosts weekly free food markets for those in the community who need it. Salt & Straw also works with Share Our Strength (No Kid Hungry), another food waste and insecurity organization that provides kids around the country with healthy meals.

"We have this interesting super power where people are coming in to learn about something," said Tyler. "They're already buttered up to learn, and we want them to sample. Sometimes they'll sample and we have this opportunity through our customer service to create a dialogue that there isn't much room to talk about sometimes, especially in more divisive moments."

After spending so much time trying coffee and picking apart the flavors in each sip, it's no surprise that the first-ever Salt & Straw flavor Tyler Malek created — sea salt with caramel ribbons — is still one of the most popular ice cream flavors on the menu. His idea to invert the salt and the caramel and introduce the rich, burnt caramel as a ribbon going through it was (and continues to be) an incredible flavor feat, stemming from the combination of sweet and salty as well as the dairy sourcing. The better the dairy, the more likely you are to taste each flavorful element.

Since making sea salt with caramel a staple of the Salt & Straw menu, Tyler has continued to test and tweak the recipe to make sure it's as delicious as possible. Relying on the salt knowledge of Mark Bitterman, author of the book "Salted" and his self-proclaimed salt guru, Tyler has introduced new and different styles of salt — like Guatemalan sun-dried fleur de sel — to enhance the flavor and make it even more balanced and desirable. It's this type of high-impact flavor that keeps fans coming back, and while they may always end up going for something more traditional like chocolate brownie or vanilla bean, they'll be tempted to try a flavor like sea salt caramel or foie gras to get that one-of-a-kind tasting experience.

While flavors like sea salt with caramel ribbon and pot of gold and rainbows (a Lucky Charms-inspired flavor) have done incredibly well, not every flavor has been a home run. In fact, some have been so controversial that they either barely made it to market, or didn't make it at all. The first memorable flop? A crab roll Neapolitan ice cream sandwich. In an attempt to partner with the Oregon Crab Commission, Tyler Malek tried his best to find a way to turn crab into a dessert, starting with a lemon juice sorbet and an Old Bay seasoning. Despite his best efforts, it simply wasn't enough. The ice cream sandwich may have been a fail, but there were still some positives that came from the experience.

"A week before it was going on the menu, I had to call and say I'm sorry, but this is horrible. It's so bad," said Tyler. "That being said, what we designed out of that, we had to create cool techniques to make it more palatable ... we made a milk sorbet that is one of my favorite recipes to this day."

Another controversial flavor? Deviled egg ice cream. Unlike the crab ice cream sandwich which never made it outside the test kitchen, the deviled egg ice cream did have a chance to be sampled by guests. Made with an egg yolk custard, Kala Namak black salt, homemade marshmallow with chives, and a parmesan tuille for crunch, the well-intentioned yet sulfury flavor was met with anger rather than fanfare.

The ethos of Salt & Straw is that ice cream is for everyone. That said, Tyler Malek is a self-proclaimed food science nerd, so it's safe to say that the work going on behind the scenes is part chef ingenuity, and part food science. One of Tyler's favorite examples of using outside-the-box thinking to achieve flavor greatness is via a recipe for a fish sauce caramel. When the recipe wasn't working after many trials with his favorite fish sauce and granulated sugar, a friend's advice helped to point him in the right direction.

"What I like about this recipe is it was my education in the world of, there's a classic saying 'what grows together goes together,'" he said. "You have to take that further sometimes, what's cooked together cooks together." By using a sugar that comes from Southeast Asia, where fish sauce comes from, rather than bleached white sugar, the recipe was transformed for the better.

While Tyler isn't using any unusual equipment to make his ice cream, he does rely on food science to get a better product. Enter: Xanthan gum, which Tyler uses as a substitute for eggs and egg yolks in the majority of his ice creams. Additionally, Tyler relies on the power of acids, like citric, malic, and tartaric, to make his flavors pop. For example, in a currant ice cream, he would use a blend of malic and tartaric acids — both of which are found in currants — to help bolster its tangy flavor.

If you're all about that plant-based life but also happen to appreciate ice cream in January (kudos to you, by the way), you're in luck. The menu to open the new year is always a love letter to vegan ice cream. By using new styles of non-dairy milks for the ice cream bases, as well as using more innovative and indulgent ingredients, that January vegan menu is just as sought after as the dairy-based menu. Not much of a cold-weather ice cream eater? Fear not, the Salt & Straw menu is 20% vegan the rest of the year.

"Last year we did a [vegan] bananas foster ... we made a bananas foster rum caramel," Tyler Malek said. "We did a death by chocolate cake with six different chocolate elements. We made an ice cream base that was banana and avocado. We're testing and figuring out how to create a texture that's creamy without any nut-based or major allergens. It becomes a playground for us to push the limits."

While pushing these limits, Tyler and his team found themselves with something they'd never encountered before: Milk made from upcycled barley grain. A local brewery that was producing barley and extracting the nutrients from the spent grain reached out to Tyler in the hopes of working together, and from the partnership came one of his favorite ice creams.

Two heads are better than one, and five heads are better than two. This is the mindset that helps to keep the Salt & Straw menu so innovative. By partnering with between 30 and 50 local businesses a year, Tyler Malek is expanding the reach and purpose of Salt & Straw far beyond ice cream.

Since the business first started and Tyler relied on the city of Portland for his culinary education, he has worked to build these bridges. Working with Fran's Chocolates, a pioneer in the chocolate industry and essentially the mother of the salted caramel trend in the United States, means an incredible partnership for the yearly chocolatiers menu. A partnership with Monica Martinez's company Don Bugito (which makes sustainable protein snacks from insects) means thousands of bugs every year for bug ice cream, and the opportunity to educate people on edible bugs. In 2022, Salt & Straw partnered with the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network for a B2B mentorship program as a way to connect with small businesses and offer valuable connections for up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

"These partnerships with different companies are one of my favorite things," Tyler notes. "We try to find this balance because there are heroes in the industry we can learn from, but there are people up and coming, people that we want to bring along. So how do we find that balance? We try to span that gap, using them as experts to bring new stories to Salt & Straw."

It's no coincidence that rum raisin is one of the 10 iconic ice cream flavors in Tyler Malek's new cookbook — the history of rum raisin goes back centuries, from liquor-cured raisins to rum showing up in custard-based desserts. While diving into the history of the flavor, Tyler was inspired to create an entire chapter for his cookbook devoted to alcohol-based ice creams as both a way to introduce new flavors to his menu and educate people on how to make ice cream with such a finicky ingredient.

"We started having fun and diving into the history, learning about what goes into distilling liqueurs at our distillery here in Portland, Stone Barn. It became an infatuation for me," he said. "Integrating those into ice cream is really hard, but there's something really unique once you learn the skills and the reasons."

Those reasons? Alcohol is extremely difficult to freeze, so to integrate it into something frozen, like ice cream, a little bit of know-how and food science is required. By determining the right ratio of alcohol to sugar to salt in the ice cream — thereby offsetting the anti-freezing qualities of the alcohol — a boozy ice cream can come to life. Just like a mixologist relies on ratios and creativity to create cocktail recipes, Tyler is doing the same, throwing the rulebook out the window and using his flavor expertise to create exciting menu items. As he says, "Nothing is off limits."