Local Scoops: Ice Cream With a Sense of Place

From birch sap to sweet corn, artisan ice cream makers are churning unique local specialties into special, seasonal scoops

Ice cream is broadly nostalgic and evocative—especially when made with ingredients iconic to a certain place. Everett Collection/Shutterstock

Tiny but mighty: New Mexico piñon nuts are intensely packed with flavor.

My sister, Kristin, and I grin with appreciation as we sample the piñon ice cream at Katrina’s, a bright, compact little sweets bistro in downtown Albuquerque. The confection not only genuinely tastes like the pine nuts—a subtly sweet butteriness—but also carries hints of the pithy, redolent aroma of this iconic Southwest food. Its essence is evocative for us both, as our adult lives started in New Mexico long ago.