ice cream lore

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Here's the scoop: How a guy named Sal started making Belfonte ice cream

Fresh milk arrives in 5,000-gallon tankers that idle briefly before unloading their cargo in the receiver room at a two-story brick building on Brooklyn Avenue east of downtown. As the milk is pumped from the trucks into oversized steel vats, like grain being moved into a silo, the clock starts ticking.

Raw milk can be stored for only 72 hours, as mandated by federal regulations. Plus, five more tankers are coming tomorrow.

It's time to make the ice cream — "the only one made right here at home," as Belfonte Ice Cream & Dairy Foods Co. likes to claim.

This place is a family operation. Henry Belfonte, 46, oversees production as general plant manager. His twin brother, , a few blocks away on Cleveland Avenue, serves as operations manager. Brother-in-law Ernie is the general sales manager.

Henry and 's father, Sal, retired in 2003 when Hiland Dairy, based in Springfield, purchased the company. But Sal, now in his early 70s, still has the boys over for Sunday night dinners to discuss the state of the business.

"I just thought that ice cream should be made here in Kansas City. And I got tired of never having the flavors I wanted to have," Sal says of his decision to launch an ice cream company in November 1985.

Employees on the Belfonte production floor wear white uniforms, looking much like the figure Sal cut as a 16-year-old delivering milk door to door. The young man who grew up in the Northeast neighborhood once known as Little Italy started Belfonte Dairy Co. in 1969, distributing milk out of a trailer on Independence Avenue.

The trailer led to a distribution center on Prospect Avenue and the purchase of Arctic Ice. It was a family business from the start, with 16-year-olds Henry and bagging ice that churned from eight large restaurant-style bins. Their older brother would load trucks in the morning before high school.

Bagging ice gave the twins the physique that earned them the nickname "bulldogs." Henry ran over the offense as a fullback, and was his counterpart as linebacker for St. Pius X High School. Both boys joined the business right out of high school, proud to be working alongside their father. These days they live next door to each other in Gladstone.

"This is our name, so it matters to us that people like our product," says.

The sweet science

The industry standard for making ice cream in the age of automation is the high temperature-short time (HTST) process of pasteurization. With HTST, the ice cream mixture is super-heated (to 175 degrees in 25 seconds) and then super-cooled in rapid succession.

Belfonte, on the other hand, still uses batch, or vat, pasteurization, which is more time-intensive. The mix is heated to 170 degrees and held for 30 minutes. A high-pressure pump, the homogenizer, pushes that mix toward a heat exchanger, where the temperature is dropped to 37 degrees.

"It was the way it was done in the old days. Our dad wanted to make sure our ice cream tasted like it did back then," Henry says.

The ice cream mix is cooled for 24 hours, held in one of four refrigerated tanks. The long wait over, the batch heads to one of the three-compartment flavoring vats. Liquid is added to establish the base flavor: the chocolate in Extreme Moose Tracks, for instance, or cherry in Belfonte's signature ice cream, spumoni.

"It's not that different from the old-time method of cooking a pot of chili," says. "If you leave it in the fridge for a week and come back, it just tastes better. You just have to give the flavors a chance to mingle, and with patience, everything blossoms."

By JONATHAN BENDER

Special to The Star

Destini Lawson, 7, samples mom Sondra 's cone at Scoop-n-Scoot at 39th and Indiana, which sells Belfonte ice cream.