Dolores Hidalgo ice cream

The small town of Dolores Hidalgo is a suggested day trip from San Miguel de Allende. With its classic cathedral-adorned town plaza and a booming community of artisan potters, the town feels completely authentic. The dusty streets have a slow-motion bustle of push carts, bicycles, and taxis; the pottery warehouses double as studios with artisans painting and shaping clay in the back; the food market steams with cooking rice, boiling beans, frying tortillas, and brewing coffee; and on the corner of the grassy, bench-encircled plaza a large wooden cart sits quietly, selling perhaps the world’s best ice cream.

The only advertisement appears on the front of the cart. Hand-painted white letters spell the flavors: avocado, pine nut, rum, rice pudding, tequila, cerveza, cheese, mole poblano, pistachio, lemon, strawberry. We approach, hungry but more curious. The owner of the cart pulls out a handful of little wooden spoons and begins scooping little samples. Each one is perfectly creamy (avocado, pine nut, pistachio) or icy (tequila, lemon, rum). We begin asking questions about who makes it. The cart owner tells us it’s his brother and we can learn from him if we want. His name is Salvador and he lives just up the road from town and may be making some flavors today.

Our personal tour guide rolls his Suburban to a halt on a street a few blocks off the plaza. We’d been told Salvador lived on this block, right hand side. I ask a woman sweeping her patio, “Buscamos a la casa de Salvador Torres.”

“Aqui mismo,” she says, pointing next door to the little house that matches the others on the street: brightly painted but chipping, a little concrete wall, and a front door just a few steps up from the sidewalk. We knock.

A short. lean man in his late 30s answers wearing a pair of old, torn jeans, and a hooded sweatshirt on this chilly morning. We introduce ourselves as visitors who just met his brother and tried his delicious ice cream. Can we ask him some questions and learn how he makes the unforgettable flavors? A smile opens Salvador’s face and a few teeth poke out, not many: a good sign for an ice-cream maker.

“No mixing today, too cold this morning,” he told us. “But you can come in and see the equipment.”

We sat in the recently hosed-down interior patio/living room under an odd pale light diffused through the green plastic panels overhead. Salvador Torres tells us his story. He’s been dancing with ice cream for over a decade. His father began churning after tiring of the risky police work in small-town Dolores Hidalgo of Mexico’s Guanajuato state. Father Torres decided to bring ice cream to the town so he started simple: vanilla and lemon out of a pushcart wheeled through town. He made it well and well-made ice cream is not hard to sell, so he got creative with his flavors. And then he taught his son, Salvador, to dance.

But sitting with gringo guests seems uncomfortable for Salvador, so we ask about the process. His smile returns. He jumps up and shows us the 30 liter steel tubes into which he adds ice, sugar, fruit/tequila/beer/mole, and milk brought fresh each morning from a nearby farm. He brings the tube over to a wooden cask that looks like a Mayflower relic.

“You fill this with ice, put the steel tube down in it and start shaking. After a while you stop, grab the stirring rod and stir the ingredients in the tube. Then you scrape the rod to remove the built-up ice back into the mix. Do it again,” he tells us.

For 1.5 – 2 hours Salvador shakes, stirs, and scrapes. Then the product is complete and he begins another batch, usually working eight-hour days. In the states we’d call the operation a work/live situation; we might even feature Salvador as a Cottage Industry in this magazine. We ask him about modernizing the operation. Has he ever wanted to hire helpers or take advantage of mechanical aids or electrical mixers?

Not really. Salvador is a one-man show partially because he is an admitted control freak (he won’t make avocado ice cream if the local open-air market does not have ripe avocados) and partially because his former assistant ran off after meeting a lady and his one-time-assistant nephew ran off to start his own ice cream cart. It’s no competition, says Salvador, because the kid didn’t learn the art of the process. We asked Salvador if he ever thought of using a hand crank or an electric shaker. No, electric stuff breaks and, frankly, he likes the activity of it all, the dance.

We leave with a carton of strawberry and one of vanilla, a bag of hand-rolled sugar cones, and a heap of thanks for coming to his house and sharing in his passion. We thanked the greatest ice cream maker on earth and drove away.