WEEKEND: Jordan's Ice Creamery serves up over 40,000 gallons of homemade ice cream through the season

BELMONT — A teenager when his father and mother opened Jordan's Ice Creamery 20 years ago, Craig Jordan, operates the business today with help from his family. "The only time I get ahead is when we close for the season. It's non-stop."

His father, Eric, said the business has grown five, 10, 15-percent every year since it began, and Jordan added that this year, for reasons he cannot fully fathom, sales have boomed. "Yesterday it was just out of control," he said. "We were really busy and a Concord Trailways bus pulled up and dropped off 70 people," he recalled. "We had 200 people waiting in line."

Along with serving daily at the parlor in Belmont, Jordan's sells ice cream on race days at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, where its was recently chosen the best food on offer. Jordan said he also caters private ice cream socials and distributes to restaurants. For the past three years Jordan's has topped the WMUR-TV poll as serving the best ice cream in New Hampshire.

Jordan begins making ice cream around nine o'clock each morning and finishes about seven o'clock every evening seven days a week. "Those two machines are running constantly," he said. He estimated that over the course of the season, between April and Columbus Day, he produces some 45,000 gallons in more than 200 different flavors. Jordan's also makes ice cream cakes and pies, low-fat and non-fat yogurts as well as sugar-free ice cream, sorbet and soft-serve in a variety of flavors.

Eric said that while children clamor for ice cream, their parents decide where to get it. Consequently, he explained from the outset Jordan's has offered a wide range of products and flavors to appeal to palates of different ages and tastes. Although Jordan inherited a vast array of flavors, he has eagerly added to it. "One of the things I enjoy is trying things that may seem a bit off the wall," he said.

Salted caramel crunch with pretzel, Jordan said, quickly became among the best sellers. "I'd make six two-and-a-half gallon tubs one day and its gone the next," he said. "I can't make enough of it." He confessed to surprise at the popularity of maple ice cream laced with candied bacon, which he said was immediately very popular. "We're taking orders for it," he remarked. Fond of red wine, Jordan made a batch of cabernet sauvignon ice cream. "I haven't sold it because of the alcohol content," he said. "First, I want to make sure I can do it."

Jordan said 28 ice cream flavors, along with seven sugar-free plus four low-fat yogurt and three non-fat yogurt, are posted each day along with more than two dozen "mix-ins" from M & Ms and Snickers to gummy bears and nerds. He said that 23 of the 28 flavors are staples while the remaining five rotate among the more exotic. Noting that some favorites are always missing, he conceded "some people are happy most of the time and some people are angry some of the time. I'm threatened once a day for not having the ice cream somebody wants," he laughed.

Cones come in four sizes and for the ambitious there is the "Belly Buster" — five scoops of ice cream, a banana, a cookie, whipped cream, nuts and a cherry — served in a bucket with a shovel, which Jordan said is selling especially well this season.

Apart from the ice cream, sorbets and yogurts, Jordan's also makes its own waffle cones, cookies for ice cream sandwiches and whipped cream topping fresh daily. "We try to make as much in-house as we can," Jordan said. "It's a fun business."

Jordan's Ice Creamery is just north of the junction of NH Route 106 and NH Route 140 in Belmont and is open seven days a week from 11:30 a.m. until 9 a.m.

CAPTION: Eric Jordan (left), who with his wife Gail opened Jordan's Ice Creamery in Belmont 20 years ago, still lends his son Craig (right) a helping hand with the growing business that viewers of WMUR-TV have named the best ice cream parlor in New Hampshire for the last three years. (Laconia Daily Sun photo/Michael Kitch)