I'm going to be upfront with my bias: I love frozen custard.
Truthfully, I love all frozen treats, custard pie and dairy in general.
But this is not a story about my sometimes questionable dietary choices. This is a story about frozen custard culture in Milwaukee and three questions Bubbler Talk listener Sarah Brecke asked us:
"How many individual custard places does Milwaukee have, how many started in Milwaukee and is there a current standing rating?"
Let's get into it.
Dozens of custard stands, past and present
On the surface, this seems straightforward. The short answer is that custardmke.com, created by Noah Huotari, tracks custard locations with real-time updates on things like flavors of the day. The site’s map includes 51 locations in the Milwaukee area. Of these, 33 are Culver’s, which, despite being ubiquitous in Milwaukee today, originated in Sauk City.
But it turns out that conducting an official custard census, much like the official once-in-a-decade population census, is anything but straightforward. Some custard stands close for the season, others do not advertise—relying instead on word-of-mouth marketing—or invest more in advertising their burgers than their custard.
Historically, this has always been the case. Bobby Tanzilo and Kathleen McCann co-authored "Milwaukee Frozen Custard," a book covering the local history of custard. When researching the book, McCann says they relied just as much on ephemera and emailed tips as they did official records.
"The way you find out about a custard stand might be someone would tell you or email you, or you'd see a matchbook somewhere with the name and address of a custard stand," McCann says.
Tanzilo adds that often custard stands did not need to advertise their location at all, relying instead on their proximity to social gatherings.
"There was one on 72nd and North in Wauwatosa that, you know, probably didn't need to advertise because they had so much local business after, like, Tosa East football games," Tanzilo says. "Everybody kind of knew what was in their neighborhood."
By 1950, McCann says custard culture was here to stay in Milwaukee. Imagine a custard stand on nearly every corner, often there just for a season or a few years before disappearing—sometimes popping up elsewhere and sometimes being replaced by another stand.
Tanzilo says the ubiquity of custard stands is no accident. Certainly, the popularity of the product helped drive business, but in addition, Milwaukee’s custard producers did not play by the established rules of American capitalism. Instead of jostling in a fight to emerge as the sole custard king, the business of custard was a story of cooperative economics.
Tanzilo explains how Leon Schneider, founder of Leon's Frozen Custard, saw the success of competing businesses as good for his business as well.
"Leon always said that he wanted everyone to make good custard because if somebody tried custard somewhere else and didn't like it, they would just decide they didn't like custard, and that would be bad for his business and everyone's business," Tanzilo says. "So there was always this kind of cooperation toward keeping the quality strong."
The math of custard
There are actually federal regulations about what makes custard, custard. For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration mandates that, in order to advertise as custard, the product has to be at least 1.4% egg yolks by weight and 10% butterfat.
But Kurt Fogle, partner at Dairyland Old Fashioned Hamburgers and Frozen Custard, says this does not mean federal authorities are consistently testing his frozen treats.
"I haven't had any FDA investigators visit us. I think we're a drop in an ocean of ice cream products out there," Fogle says. "But in order to achieve the quality that we're after, we have to hit these numbers anyway."
The science of custard is fairly complex, with each stand using slightly different balances of egg yolk, sugars, stabilizers, and storage temperatures to achieve their own unique balance of taste and texture. Behind the sweet, creamy curtain, Fogle says it's mostly about math.
"I performed very poorly in math and science in high school and college, but it turns out that most of my job is math and chemistry," he says.
Judging a custard
There have been attempts to judge custard in a standardized way. There is an annual custard contest at the Wisconsin State Fair, and Tanzilo and McCann discuss the 1981 “Custard’s Last Stand” competition in their book.
But they also note that competitions like these are not the best for judging custard because real custard needs to continually churn, and transporting custard messes with its texture.
"I'm not sure the consistency was probably at its best for any of them," McCann says. "I just don't think it's a fair test."
Fogle says there are technical items you can judge a custard by.
"Flavor and texture are probably tied for importance. One thing that a lot of people know, but maybe don't think about, is this serving temperature of custard," Fogle says, explaining that the temperature the custard is stored and served at matters for a consistent texture and that instant melt on your tongue.
But Fogle adds that these technical aspects are not why custard has enjoyed decades of continued success, why custard stands don't always need to advertise, or what people usually remember about their custard excursions.
"A lot of people who are from the area grew up with one of these shops in their neighborhood, or one their parents took them to during their childhood. That's the number one thing you have to compete with in this business: nostalgia," Fogle says.
"Everybody's favorite custard place is the place they were raised on. So quality comes in second place in my opinion to that."
The people agree
When I asked Bubbler Talk listener Sarah Brecke about her custard memories, she told me about teenage memories and a recent excursion with her out-of-state friend.
"When one of my friends came up to visit from Colorado, we went on a custard crusade. So every day we went to a different custard spot and tried their custard for like five days straight," she says.
Brecke and I visited a custard stand for this story to hear from Milwaukee’s custard fiends, the people for whom custard is a year-round indulgence. We wanted to hear from these loyal custard consumers what mattered most between flavor, texture, and temperature to inform our rating system.
But what we found confirmed Fogle's suspicions: we love custard, but we love the memories it unlocks more.
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