@colettekomm via Instagram
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When temperatures plummeted to 4 degrees on Friday morning, most New Yorkers bundled up and stayed inside. But fashion designer Colette Komm saw an opportunity.
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The Upper West Side resident decided to turn her fire escape into a makeshift ice cream maker, placing her KitchenAid stand mixer outside at 8 a.m. to churn a custard base of cream, milk, egg yolks, sugar, and vanilla. She documented the experiment on Instagram, where it quickly went viral, racking up over 800,000 views.“In my tiny New York City apartment, I don’t have room to store an ice cream maker or room in my tiny freezer to even freeze the bowl that goes into an ice cream maker,” Komm explained to the NY Post, which first reported this story. “So when I saw that the temperature was going to be so low for such a long time, I got to thinking maybe I could just do this in my KitchenAid on the fire escape.”
The experiment proved more challenging than anticipated. After an hour, the custard mixture registered at 31 degrees—below freezing, but not cold enough. Even after two hours, Komm reported it was “maybe like a milkshake, it’s not even at a Wendy’s Frosty stage.”
By hour three, she resorted to a very New York solution: a trip to her local bodega for a bag of ice and coarse salt to wrap around the bowl. Six hours after starting, she finally had ice cream.
“My cousin came over for dinner and we ate it over some apple crisp I made and it tasted great, but the texture was too light and aerated, probably from the five hours of mixing,” she said.
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Komm, who grew up in Vancouver and makes 20 different flavors of ice cream every summer at her parents’ house, found herself at the center of an online conversation that was equal parts admiration and concern.Supporters praised her ingenuity with comments like “Greatest city on earth because of people like you” and “We love a woman in STEM.” Some even suggested she start a business called “Fire Escape Ice Cream.”
Others were more skeptical, raising questions about air quality and the hazards of outdoor food preparation in New York City. “Does it taste like the exhaust fumes in the air?” one commenter asked, while others worried about pigeons and falling debris.
Komm took the criticism in stride. “Put a KitchenAid on your fire escape and everyone’s on your case like they are the health department,” she laughed.
When she polled her followers asking “Would you eat NYC fire escape ice cream?” a resounding 70% said yes—proving that Upper West Siders’ appetite for creative solutions to small-apartment living remains strong, even in single-digit temperatures.
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