The best ice-cream you’ve never had is at a pop-up in northern NSW

July 25, 2025
8:03 pm

Plum pie ice-cream on a miso cookie, and hot rice pudding with spiced brown butter served with warming galangal ice-cream, are among the creative scoops at Bush Ice-Creamery on the NSW North Coast.

In the world of ice-cream vendors, there are a few main camps. Creamy, aerated cups and cones from your local parlour. Dense, intensely flavoured scoops from neighbourhood gelaterias. Then there’s restaurant ice-cream, an entirely alt genre where chefs make the bases in wild proportions, dial down the sugar, freeze hard, then spin to order.

For whatever reason – scale, convenience – these restaurant techniques have rarely crossed over into shopfronts. But in sleepy Brunswick Heads, Bush Ice-Creamery, a two-day-a-week pop-up run out of local cafe Daily Counter, is bridging the divide. The result might just be the state’s best ice-cream.

Roll up on Fridays or Saturdays and Wal Foster is in residence. He’ll scoop Ooray plum pie ice-cream onto a miso cookie, top it with pepperberry meringue, blowtorch it, then finish it with an Atherton raspberry. He’ll spoon orange jelly into a cup with Jersey-milk ice-cream and cap it with whipped cultured cream. He’ll drizzle hot rice pudding with spiced brown butter and serve it with an orb of warming galangal ice-cream.

A Pillar Valley boy, Foster apprenticed at Aria before embarking on a cooking career that took him to Melbourne and through Europe, where he opened Drangen restaurant in Sweden. The dessert work there shifted Foster’s palate from savoury to sweet but he missed home, so after 6½ years away he moved back.

“I saw the indigenous food scene really popping off and I just wanted to get amongst it – all this beautiful stuff that I grew up around,” he says. That, paired with an interest in organics and the rest of the bounty the Northern Rivers offers – rich, floral honey, sweet Jersey milk, subtropical fruits – led to him launching Natural Ice-Cream Australia during COVID, which he ran from a caravan. Acclaim followed but things weren’t sustainable, and the business folded.

Bush Ice-Creamery, leaner and more personal, is Foster’s next act and the results are like nothing else. Typically, ice-creams, gelatos, even sorbets are churned as they freeze to keep the ice crystals small and the mouthfeel smooth. But in restaurants they’re frozen first, then spun to order in a Pacojet or (like Foster’s) in a FRXSH Mousse Chef machine, inventions that turn ice-cream making inside-out by churning – blending, really – frozen and under pressure, incorporating next to no air.

Wal Foster’s scoops tend to be less sweet that conventional varieties.Natalie Grono

One factor – and Foster can go deep on this – is about how blast-chilling then spinning his ice-creams to order keeps the texture beautifully, impossibly silky. Another is how this lets him keep things tasting like themselves. “Most gelato I find to be too sweet because they have to put a certain amount of sugar into it so that they can churn it, freeze it, then scoop it for weeks, whereas mine has about half the amount of sugar because I can churn it to order,” Foster says.

“It means I can focus on the flavour of the ingredients of the Byron Shire and the Northern Rivers, and that’s all.” Other tricks might extend to inoculating his ice-cream bases with live cultures, adding layers of complexity.

The rest is down to an obsession with the raw materials. Eggs and sugar are certified organic. Honey and Valencia oranges come from Foster’s backyard. The Ooray plums and Atherton raspberries? He picked them himself. The milk? From farmer and cheesemaker Deb Allard in Burringbar. “She’s got 200 Jersey cows eight minutes north of where I am, so I go to the farm and pick up 10 or 20 litres of Jersey milk. It’s been pasteurised, like, the day before, and I’ll make it straight into ice-cream.”

The greatest trick, though? How absolutely, thoroughly approachable it is. Foster might use all the techniques in the book, but if you didn’t ask you’d never know. You’ll just taste warm spices and your grandma’s rice pudding. The sunshine and nostalgia of jelly and ice-cream. Long summer days, bare feet, fresh berries and a flash of your childhood – just better.