MIJO ice cream relies on local Sassy Cow milk as its base.
Madison is often praised as a city with a culinary scene that punches well above its weight class. But when El Grito Taqueria co-owner Joshua Barraza would visit places like Chicago and Los Angeles, he noticed that the bigger cities had something that Madison seemingly lacked — higher-end, artisanal ice cream.
“You can go to those cities and almost get a better product than we can here in America’s dairyland,” Barraza says. To remedy this, he and El Grito co-owner Matthew Danky launched MIJO Frozen Treats. The new ice cream push cart debuts April 17 and will be vending at the top of State Street Tuesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. MIJO will also be at the Dane County Farmers Market on Saturday mornings, as well as pop-up events throughout the city.
“We wanted to do ice cream before we even started doing tacos,” Barraza says. But when he and Danky researched what it would take to produce their own frozen treats, they realized that the necessary production facility and licensing would be too expensive for their small startup. So they put the idea on ice, so to speak, and shifted their focus to tacos. El Grito has been successful enough since launching in 2015 to allow the co-owners to hire employees to help run the show so they could turn their attention to making ice cream.
MIJO partners with Sassy Cow Creamery in Columbus for production — a money-saving move that also provides access to high-quality milk from the farm’s herd of dairy cows. Barraza and Danky developed the recipes and fine-tuned the production methods. “We’re using less oxygen,” Barraza says, noting that ice cream producers frequently pump their product full of air to give it more volume. “Ours will have more of a gelato texture,” he says.
The name MIJO comes from Spanish slang meaning “my son” (also a general term of endearment). Both founders have close ties to Mexico, and the country has inspired some of MIJO’s flavors. There will be eight varieties available initially, including blueberry vanilla, honey toffee, cardamom and horchata. For summer, they plan to expand the menu to include vegan fruit sorbet.
For now, MIJO will focus on street vending and pop-ups, but Barraza says he and Danky have considered expanding into grocery stores, restaurants or even their own scoop shop. “With El Grito, our goal was never to open up a brick and mortar — and we probably will never open a brick and mortar,” he says. “But with ice cream, we’re not necessarily setting those barriers.”
