Food is a love language—especially in my family. My Taidam dad has hunted and fished for more than seven decades to keep our dinner table abundant. My Lao mom has made most everything from scratch from growing hard-to-find herbs and vegetables to fermenting sauces (that sometime takes years before it’s ready) to tirelessly stoking the fire to smoke the fish she and Dad caught just hours before. I’ve grown up seeing how much work and dedication they’ve put into providing for our family. Greetings are still “Are you hungry? Eat!” before it is “Hello!” Meals are communal where family and friends gather often. This love to nourish and share drives my desire to create and make happiness for others. And so, choosing ice cream as my own love language felt like second nature. And because I love ice cream, of course!

My goal was to make the best ice cream I could starting with just natural cream, milk, and sugar. I drew upon my lifetime’s journey and experiences of cooking, eating, observing my mom’s duteous process of making food from scratch. I’d use what I’d learn from the decades of countless experimenting with all sorts of ingredients, the embarrassing amount of hours of watching cooking shows, my never-ending recipe tweaking (because I couldn’t just accept that it was the best), and the travels that took me to more than 24 countries from Italy more than a dozen times (ummm, hello gelato!) to Japan (where I stumbled upon a little Dutch-style door through which the sweetest old lady so proudly served me her homemade ice cream) and to Southeast Asia (where I had the most luscious fresh coconut popsicle). 

Et voila—Baan Vaan—which loosely translates to “Sweet Village” in the Taidam/Lao language. (Pronounced like Bon Jovi and Vince Vaughn.) Our ice cream is made in small batches and we do a lot of in-house baking/cooking/simmering/pureeing/trial-and-error creating so I can bring you a little happiness in each lick, each bite. It truly feels decadent that I can share this with you, and I hope you find joy too!