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Cold pleasure

Food artist whips up homemade ice cream

Kerry McCluskey
Northern News Services

Iqaluit (Feb 12/01) - Leave Baskin Robbins and all 31 flavours behind.

Forget everything you've ever heard about chocolate and Haagen Das.

Tasty as they might be, they can't -- and don't -- hold a candle to the magical frozen creations whipped up by Dominique Mougin, one of Iqaluit's premiere waiters.

As the spoon makes contact with your tongue and caramel becomes the only taste you know, there can be no doubt that you made the right dessert choice.

"I had a restaurant for five years and I started to make the ice cream there. It was something unusual," said Mougin, of the specialty item that makes its way onto the Discovery Lodge Hotel's menu every now and again.

Self-taught in the culinary art of ice-cream preparation, Mougin said he strived to have the different flavours appear on the menu as often as possible.

"It's a dessert I make about every three weeks," said Mougin. "I don't really promote it because it's a question of time. I'd do it if it was the only thing I had to do."

Clocking about 70 hours a week serving French cuisine to the community's diners, Mougin said his ice cream takes a minimum of three hours to prepare. Even though it's a best-seller when it is available, he said there just wasn't time to have it constantly on hand. Mougin said the combination of egg yolks, milk, cream, whip cream, sugar, natural vanilla beans and unsalted butter had taken him years to perfect, but he'd managed to get the right balance of ingredients and had the consistency of the ice cream down to a science.

"It's not liquid and not solid. It has to be just in between so it sticks to the spoon," he said. "It took me time to know that and to know things like at what point is the best colour for caramel."

The dessert consistently receives rave reviews from diners -- especially when it appears on top of pecan or apple pie -- but its success means ice cream aficionados are about to suffer a loss.

Mougin is leaving Iqaluit to move back to his Montreal home to start up an ice cream and desert business. While he said he'd miss Iqaluit and the friends he's made, the lure of being his own boss and creating deserts on a full-time basis was enticing him south.

"Sad? Yes, in a way. But, on the other hand I'm very excited," said Mougin, a an Iqaluit fixture for the last five years. "Some people didn't even know ice cream could be like this. It's enticed me to do it for myself."