WHEN Steven Darvill picked up the first pails of milk from his own Jersey cows in March, it was the beginning of a new chapter for The Handmade Ice Cream Company.

Ever since starting his dairy brand near Ulverston six years ago, the former pastry chef has been on a mission to use the best possible ingredients in his luxury product.

But without a farm or milking herd to call his own, he relied on middlemen to provide his main ingredient.

All that changed two months ago when Steven went into partnership with a small dairy farm in the Cartmel Valley. By essentially buying eight of the animals in its Jersey herd, he’s guaranteed himself a weekly supply of enough rich milk to make all the luxury ice cream his customers crave.

“Normal milk is water in comparison with Jersey milk” he says. “It’s not just the butterfat - Jersey milk has five to eight per cent fat content compared with 3.5 per cent in standard whole milk. It’s the taste. Jersey milk has a creamier, more custardy, old-fashioned flavour. No other milk comes close.”

From the farm where Steven collects fresh-from-the-parlour milk every day, it’s a short drive back to the Clock Tower Business Centre by the river Leven near Cark-in-Cartmel. Here, in a small dairy and production kitchen, Steven makes his cow-to-carton ice cream with the same attention to detail and provenance that he applies to his single-origin milk.

“The best products require the best ingredients,” he says. “I could put additives and colouring into normal milk to make it look and taste a bit like Jersey, but it’s never going to be the same.”

Standing apart from all the mass-produced ‘luxury’ ice cream on the market has been Steven’s rum-and-raisin d’être since he started The Handmade Ice Cream Company. A stay-at-home Dad to Freddie, now six, he’d got out of catering “because it’s not conducive to having a life”.

“I realised there is a lot of equipment and time involved in making ice cream, and that’s not something the average pastry chef has,” he explains. “So you’ll spend all day making a nice dessert but buy in an average ice cream to serve with it. My ice cream is what chefs would make if they had the time and the kit.”

That means whole milk, double cream, proper chocolate, no thickeners, no extracts, no ready-made purees. His chocolate ice cream, for example, is made with Valrhona 70 per cent solid chocolate chips - one of the best couvertures that money can buy. The result tastes like melted chocolate - a world away from the powdery texture of most commercial chocolate ices. It’s Freddie’s favourite, too, Steven says. “You’d think being my ice-cream taster would be a dream job for a six-year-old. But with Freddie it’s chocolate or nothing.”

Pass the scoop, Freddie. The rest of us are only too happy to step in and sample some of the other 20-plus varieties whose ingredients are as handmade as it says on the tub. For his Gingerbread ice cream, Steven makes a simple shortbread using flour, sugar and butter. Then he crumbles it with spices, treacle, golden syrup, mixed peel and crystallised ginger and bakes it again to produce an intense ginger biscuit to combine with stem-ginger syrup.

Sticky Toffee ice cream starts life as a whole oven-fresh pudding - sauce and all - baked from scratch to fold through the Jersey ice-cream base. Salted Caramel is churned with a stovetop caramel, cooked to the edge of darkness and sprinkled with Cornish sea salt. Strawberries are roasted whole to intensify their flavour; Lyth valley damsons are stewed into a compote; fresh lemons are juiced and zested to give a feisty edge to Lemon Meringue Pie ice cream.

“It’s time-consuming, but that’s what an artisan does,” says Steven, who invested £25,000 on a five-litre Italian churner and “the price of a new VW Golf” on his 60-litre pasteuriser. The latter both heat treats and ages the ice-cream base. Raw milk goes in, together with double cream and sugar. It’s heated up to 85 degrees C, held there for one second, then cooled and left alone for 12 hours. This ageing period develops the custardy flavours in the milk, which come from the cow and not from any eggs (eggs are too unstable for a commercial kitchen, Steven says - he uses a plant-based emulsifier instead).

There’s one he made earlier sitting in the pasteuriser when Taste visits. Steven passes a five-litre jugful through a sieve to catch the gritty pieces of vanilla pod that have been steeping in the milk mixture. Then he pours it into the churner. This is the stage at which compotes, caramels, crumbs and cakes would normally be added. It whirrs and wobbles (just a little bit: this is an Italian racehorse of an ice-cream maker) for six minutes or so, then ice cream oozes out.

“It never tastes better than when it’s just been made,” says Steven, as he hands out little tubs of vanilla-seed speckled ice cream the colour of milk, not yellow food dye. Softer and smoother than it would be out of the freezer - it comes out at -10 degrees but will be blast-chilled for storage and delivery to more than 100 shops, restaurants and cafes. - it has a pure, lingering creaminess that leaves us holding out our paper cups for more.

He prides himself on giving us the old-fashioned flavour of a “quintessential British summer”, but Steven’s approach to food and business is refreshingly 21st-century. Among his range of flavours are four vegan varieties, three of which - vanilla, chocolate and strawberry - are made using cashew milk that he soaks and blends

himself (the fourth one, coconut, is based on coconut cream).

He hopes that the popularity of non-animal-based diets encourages all consumers to think about where food comes from and drives up standards of animal welfare.

“From a personal point of view, I want farming to be done in the nicest possible way. That’s why I’m delighted to be able to get milk from a small-scale farm where the husbandry

is so good that they know every animal by name.

“I want my son to realise that if you’re going to do these things you’ve got to do them well and sometimes you have to take a bit less profit yourself. Instead of making people feel bad about using milk, I want to make the whole thing more transparent and use less dairy product from a better background.”

Everything in moderation, then, and no apologies for producing an expensive but not inaccessible product that’s designed to be enjoyed in small quantities, not gobbled by the tubful (although that’s tempting).

Steven, who hopes to open an ice cream parlour soon if he can find the right venue, tries not to eat ice cream every day, unless he’s sampling new batches. But he is partial to a boule or two of chocolate orange, his current favourite, made just like the plain chocolate variety but with fresh orange zest added to the mix.

And his preferred way of eating it? “With sunshine, preferably,” he says. “Sunshine and a holiday would be good.”

The Handmade Ice Cream Company is available from Booths, Tebay Services and independent farm shops and delis throughout the north west.

Handmadeicecream.co.uk

Stockists include Booths, Tebay Services and independent farm shops, village shops and delis throughout Cumbria and the north west.