Savoring the Flavor

First, she savors, ever so slowwww-ly, the frosty chill of blueberry and vanilla ice cream.

Barely a nanosecond has elapsed when her taste buds are tickling from the tangy ribbon of strawberry swirl.

And, hold on here, is that a firecracker noise emanating from her mouth?

Yup, the final piece de resistance: crackling rock candies exploding like bombs bursting in air.

Welcome to one delicious moment in Cathy Bieker’s workday.

It’s just one moment, mind you, since Bieker’s job as a Baskin-Robbins ice cream creator is chock-full of such sweet sensations. She whipped up the red-white-and-blue patriotic tribute dubbed “Firecracker Crunch” a few years back.

In two months, that July flavor of the month will be scooped by another Bieker treat: America’s Birthday Cake.

She dreamed this one up by toying with a white cake flavor, strawberry ice cream, blue whipped cream frosting and cake morsels.

Most folks lack the requisite willpower for a spoonful to melt at a glacial pace. Most mouths just greedily dive into those ices and sorbets, frozen yogurts and gelatis.

Yet, just as serious wine connoisseurs sniff and swirl, swish and swallow, a connoisseur of frozen desserts never rushes to judgment.

Feel how the white cake ice cream dissolves more slowly in your mouth to subtly mimic cake, Bieker said. “It has a warmer texture because it’s an ice cream mousse that has more air in it, so it melts slower.”

Oops. Too late. One mouth eagerly snarfed a bite too swiftly to differentiate the dissolve rates of strawberry or cake ice cream.

If you think Bieker’s vocation tastes as wonderfully scrumptious as a job in the Willy Wonka chocolate factory, you’re probably right.

But with 2,400 Baskin-Robbins stores in the United States and 2,100 branches overseas (from the United Arab Emirates to Colombia to Thailand), the Glendale-born company is big business. It is now part of Allied Domecq in the United Kingdom.

Bieker’s official title is manager of product development. She has a degree from Cornell University in food science and first joined the company in 1986 in quality control at a Connecticut plant.

After detouring for one year to work, ahem, at Weight Watchers, assisting with quality control there, she returned to the ice cream firm to join their food lab in Burbank.

Bieker and her fellow product inventors know of several funky formulas that never passed muster. But for the record, Bieker, 37, won’t divulge those flavors that flunked, especially under the watchful eye of a corporate spokeswoman.

Today, B-R’s archives overflow with nearly 1,000 tried-and-true choices.

Bieker focuses on frozen treats for the U.S. In the same building, her colleagues in the international section create exotic concoctions like Wild Amazon (green avocado-coconut-guarana swirled with seven other tropical fruits and Brazil nuts), cardamom pistachio (India), and mangosteen (Philippines) for foreign consumption.

Americans, she said, like their frozen desserts sweet, preferably with chocolate and gobs of cookie tidbits. International customers “tend to have more fruit flavors and don’t like ice cream as sweet.”

Recipes are proprietary, and “We don’t talk about new flavors,” Bieker said with the solemnity of an FBI agent. Six to nine months is about the gestation period for developing a new one, she said.

Just as every profession has its own inside lingo, Bieker’s job also entails quality checks at the manufacturing plant.

She’ll slice open a tub of ice cream to make sure that those “inclusions” (chunks of cookies, candies, and other morsels) are in “all four quadrants” (evenly mixed) throughout.

She’ll peer into vats at the factory, to make sure the “variegates” (ribbons of fudge, caramel or other gooey yummy) swirl elegantly in an even pattern. (Don’t want someone to feel cheated if they don’t get their fudge along with the jamoca ice cream.)

And she’ll check to make sure that the newest “interactive” (it fizzes, pops, foams or changes color) dessert behaves properly.

“I created the powder,” she said while pouring a product designed to market the new DreamWorks animated film “Shrek.” The movie, she said, is about a green ogre in a swamp, replete with fantasy and mystery. “It’s kind of a magical theme fairy tale, so I developed a magical drink.”

It’s a cool job, she admits.

And poof, the powder turns ordinary vanilla ice cream and a soda into a fizzing, exploding mass of hot pink, ice blue or lime green drinkable magic.