Beets With Mango? Purple Door Scoops Student-Made Ice Cream

A beet and mango ice cream debuted at Purple Door Ice Cream on Wednesday.

After an unexpected loss last year, the Bay View High School culinary arts team finally got a sweet — and spicy — victory.

Four public high schools in Milwaukee compete in an annual ice cream making competition. Each school develops two flavors; this year, Bay View won with “Bango Helado con Chamoy,” a beet-mango ice cream with a spicy Mexican sauce.

For the second year (out of three years of competition), Purple Door has recreated the recipe and will be selling it until the flavor runs out. One employee estimated that the store’s supply would only last a week.


Wednesday was the first day “spicy mango,” as Purple Door calls it, was available to the public. While sweet at first taste, the light peach treat also has a spicy kick at the end of each bite. 

Emily Hernandez, 18, crafted the winning flavor with three teammates. She says Purple Door’s recreation was a little different, but still contained the same elements as their original flavor: mango, beet purée, cayenne pepper, lime juice and brown sugar.

One key difference is that the chamoy sauce is no longer garnished on top of the scoop. Instead, the Purple Door recreation incorporates some of its spice in the ice cream mixture.

Photo Credit: Hannah Hoffmeister, Milwaukee Magazine

The Bay View team thought they had last year’s competition in the bag with a strawberry lemonade flavor, culinary arts teacher Ann Marie Sims says. They did some troubleshooting from the loss to improve this year’s entries. 

“(The students) were trying to do something off the wall,” Sims said.

When someone mentioned beet, Hernandez said she immediately thought of mango as a complement. She thought of the mangonada frozen dessert, which is made with chamoy.

It’s not just about creating unique flavor profiles, though. Sims tries to prepare students for the realities of the culinary industry — one of those being that people’s diets and nutritional concerns are changing. With this in mind, the students made their ice cream sugar-free and used agave instead.

“It’s guilt-free — and you’ve got some vegetables!” Sims says.

Photo Credit: Hannah Hoffmeister, Milwaukee Magazine

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