Soft serve: Amsterdam's summer crush.
This childhood classic is growing up but staying true to itself.
🍦 SMAAK SUMMER SALE! 🍦
Good news – there’s a sale on paid subscriptions to Smaak! Support me for €4 per month if you sign up in the next week. That’s 20% off the regular price of €5 per month, which is the minimum Substack allows.
🚨 Pay a year upfront and the price drops even further to €3.20 per month – that’s less than a cappuccino a month.
I massively appreciate all the support I receive. Becoming a paid subscriber helps me to write these stories about food. If you enjoy my writing or find Smaak useful, please consider joining!
Soft serve hits hard.
I bloody love it, this fluffy ice cream that sighs away on the tongue. It’s pure nostalgia. In the UK, we have Mr. Whippy, or 99 Flakes, which you buy from ice cream vans. A Mr. Whippy is a mountainous whirl of cheap, sweet ice cream lodged on a stiff, cardboardy cone. To garnish, a Flake wedged into the side (Flakes aren’t available here for some godforsaken reason).
Unsurprisingly, 99 Flakes used to cost 99p. These days, they’re a bit dearer, but every summer, I’ll still queue up at the ice cream van, twitching like a kid as the soft serve machine rumbles out a thick curl of the stuff. Round and round it’ll go, building to a magnificent peak.
If you don’t know exactly what it is, soft serve is a lighter ice cream. Air is pumped into the mix during the freezing process, which makes it more voluminous than your gelato-from-metal-tub. It’s also served a little warmer meaning it’s good to eat, straight away.
In the Netherlands, the equivalent is softijs, but as far as I’m aware, there are no ice cream vans. Not ones with giant ice creams on their roofs that blast out music. Instead, bakeries are the places squeezing it out. But where does the best soft serve in Amsterdam? I felt it was my solemn summer duty to find out. With a list of places in my pocket and Amsterdam emerald in the sun, I hopped on my bike to find out.
First up, I went to Fort Negen. It makes sense that bakeries are embracing soft serve: its lightness pairs incredibly well with doughier products. It’s reminiscent of a chantilly cream, which you might use on pies and cakes. Structurally, both are mounds of fluted white that remind me of ski runs. It’s also, I’m guessing, dead easier to have a soft serve machine humming away in your bakery than it is to have various tubs of gelato that require a bit of bicep to scoop.
Anyway, I got mine at Fort Negen with a half-croissant-for-cone, and was asked to select a topping, choosing disco sprinkles, which sounded like something you’d take before a night out in your 20s. My soft serve was absolutely enormous, a real bonnet of dairy, and the sprinkles were as camp as I’d hoped.
I walked out like a kid with a buck-toothed grin, my ice cream heavy but never in danger of slopping onto the ground. I’d only made it a metre down the road when two people stopped me to ask me where I’d got it. My serve was a classic whip, aerated and creamy, but also filled with memories that came swimming back with every lick – slip ‘n’ slides, grassy knees, reluctant bedtimes. I ate it first in the shade, then out in the sun, which felt more right. The croissant was an excellent touch, not just a gimmick but a true partner, being as flaky as a Flake, but also sturdy, even a little fatherly.
Not too far away was my second stop, SAINT-JEAN, but the deli side, which makes its soft serve with Oatly. Say what you will about Oatly – and I’m not sure what you would say, that just felt like the right thing to say – but I do like a brand that’ll collab with independents. I ordered their salted pistachio soft serve, which plopped out of the machine in an aggressive ringlet.
I ate it under a tree, sat on a brick wall, and I’m glad I did – it was a perfect spot for a perfect soft serve, which retained the vibes of busy-doing-nothing summer days while elevating the treat ever so slightly. I was grateful that while the offering was a touch modernised, they didn’t mess around with the basics. A soft serve should remain a soft serve. SAINT-JEAN’s had a current of richness that didn’t compromise the overall lightness. Imagine the softest duvet but one housed in expensive silk covers – that was the mouthfeel. Saltiness added a third dimension. It tasted like a treasure chest, bountiful and luminescent and pulled up from the sea.
There was also a pop-up I had to try, at the very chic Dak, a coffee roaster on Bellamyplein. I’d not been here before, and based on how busy it was, I’ve been missing out. Dak calls itself a showroom. I can see why: there is something gallery-esque about the space, with its clinically white boxes of beans and its pricey selection of ceramic espresso cups. They’re doing a soft serve pop-up with Kaunis Maa from Seoul. It’s only available until the 22nd, so if you’re reading this you have to go like… right now.
The soft serve was lavender flavoured, bracingly so. At first I was worried the floral-ity might be too much but as I ate more, it mellowed, much like walking into a meadow of lavender and losing yourself in the scent. It came with berries, they were big and bouncy, and gloriously not fridge-y. My only complaint was that the strawberry hadn’t been de-leafed, meaning I had to either pick it off with my teeth or eat it anyway and then worry that I was going to die, which obviously I did and yes, I’m still worried. The price was high (€8) but seeing as this was an Amsterdam-meets-Seoul pop-up, I was willing to stomach it (pop-ups don’t make money, trust me). But soft serve should be, in my opinion, a bargain bite.
That only left Hartog’s, the truest of bakeries. It has something on offer all year: oliebollen in winter, Christmas bread at, er, Christmas and soft serve in summer. I adore Hartog’s for this seasonality. It’s something all bakeries do, but Hartog’s seem to do it in a way that feels embedded, a nod to the community, to the passing of time, instead of a perpetually rotating roster of fruity and spiced items.
The soft serve was served out of a hutch to the side of the bakery. I ordered a child’s one because I’d already eaten three soft serves and, frankly, I was in danger of creating my own kind of soft serve (sorry). It was shockingly cheap, costing less than €2 – and the adult version was only marginally more than that. I had mine dipped in chocolate, which solidified on meeting the ice cream. How cute! This was – I kid you not – the exact ice cream I’d been looking for, a soft tug back to childhood, a warm welcome home. It tasted so terrifically of dairy: rich, cow-y, straight-from-the-udder dairy, and the chocolate topping shattered fantastically on bite. Oh and the cone, it was cheap. That’s a good thing.
Four excellent offerings. Not bad for a city of Amsterdam’s size. I do think soft serve will boom very soon. Enjoy these special examples now before every single café starts oozing it out – or worse, before Starbucks gets involved.
Now leave your desk and go get one. It’s high summer, after all.
OK BYE!
Thank you for your support. It means the world to me. Feel free to get in touch about this article or any other food story.