If any of you are Elena’s fans, like me, you probably have their Instagram notifications turned on in anticipation of the weekly flavor drop.

Elena’s on Orange is a small ice cream shop in East Rock known for its soft serve, rotating flavors, and constant stream of customers. Regardless of when you go, you’re almost guaranteed to see your friends, your opps, and your TA waiting with you in line. The reliably good ice cream means that I’m willing to put aside the humiliation of making eye contact with the grader who just gave me a 50 on my assignment. But beyond the sea of babies and dogs awaiting their vanilla soft serve (they do pup cups too!) is something less stable: Geena Fram’s test kitchen. Here, flavors are tried, adjusted, and sometimes discarded before they even get on the menu.

Last week’s flavor, Honey, is both an homage to the changing season and to Winnie the Pooh’s 100th Anniversary. On the first bite, the sundae tastes so rich it’s almost savory. The honey flavor gradually accumulates and is especially brought out by the sprinkles of sea salt and pollen. The honeycomb candy really pulls its weight: it breaks apart the silky texture and brings out a nuttier quality of the honey. The resulting sundae is buttery without feeling heavy and interesting enough to keep you going back for another spoonful.

The little bear would be delighted to know that the sundae’s honey is sourced from local beekeeper Swords into Plowshares. This kind of partnership is not uncommon for Fram, Elena's test kitchen manager. She believes that using natural ingredients, as opposed to processed extracts, gets people connected to the food, and thus goes out of her way to find local suppliers. Oftentimes, this process is only possible in smaller batches, which makes Test Kitchen Wednesdays especially special.

Despite being one of the masterminds behind a New Haven staple, Fram did not start in ice cream. In college, she was a Division I rower and got used to excelling in a high-pressure environment that demands constant repetition, revision, and results.

After college, she found a similar rhythm in restaurants.

Fram worked front-of-house in Elements and Mistral, restaurants in her hometown of Princeton, New Jersey, but kept finding reasons to get closer to the kitchen. Joining chefs on foraging trips and brainstorming seasonal menus shaped her involvement in ice cream at Elena’s.

While three years ago, she only applied to be a server, her background in seasonal testing and a few proposals quickly pulled her into the realm of the test kitchen.

“Anything is ‘ice-creamable.’ It’s the perfect vehicle for flavor. If you find people who are a little bit adventurous, most things can be turned into a really lovely ice cream,” said Fram.

Based on the all-star adventurous roster of past test kitchens, filled with flavors like Ramp, Cilantro, and Christmas Tree, she seems to have found exactly those people.

Fram says that this adventurous instinct partly comes from growing up around really good ice cream, namely Bent Spoon, a similarly seasonal, farm-to-spoon ice cream shop in Princeton.

“They did all sorts of crazy flavors, which is what I’m trying to emulate. Their corn and basil ice cream are kind of the reason why I wanted to do what I do here,” said Fram.

To honor the impetus of Fram’s test kitchen, corn and basil are two of the test kitchen flavors that rotate regularly. Corn, in particular, feels familiar to me. Growing up, it was my favorite ice cream flavor when I visited China – slightly sweet, creamy, and just savory enough to make me crave it more than the usual chocolate or vanilla.

When I told Fram this, she brought out a sample.

She also brought out two other flavors: Strawberry Tomato, a unique flavor I had been kicking myself for not going to try, and Fig, a flavor she told me may remind me of my other favorite Chinese ice cream, Green Bean.

The corn was the easiest to understand. The locally sourced sweet corn ice cream called to mind hot summer hikes in Beijing and the convenience-store ice cream bars that my aunt would buy me to make the heat (and my tantrums) briefly manageable. Fram’s version had a brown butter base that wrapped the corn in a warmer, toasted richness. It tasted familiar, but more mature – less like my childhood treat and more like an elevated dessert.

The Fig was subtler. Its earthy sweetness did, in fact, remind me of the green bean ice cream I grew up eating. The flavors were not identical, but both leaned towards a nuttier, more vegetal foundation. Fram used blanched fig leaves sourced from Yale’s own Marsh Botanical Garden to infuse the base, and topped the scoop with a dusting of dried fig leaves. Getting there took some detective work: she had even gone undercover in a Connecticut fig growers’ Facebook group in search of local leaves. The result was brighter and more fragrant than I expected, given such an earthy ingredient.

The Strawberry Tomato was what I was most excited to taste. One scoop was plain Strawberry, and the other was Tomato. Both were identical, so my first bite ended up being Strawberry. It was pleasant, but nothing extraordinary. If I wanted strawberry ice cream, I could have just gone to the dining hall. The tomato, however, was completely unexpected. It was as if Fram had sucked all the defining qualities of a tomato – bright, lightly acidic, faintly vegetal – and infused it into an ice cream without preserving any of the watery texture or savoriness that would have made the ice cream feel like dinner.

This extracting-and-infusing process is a major part of Fram’s job–and one of its biggest headaches.

Still, like the Strawberry Tomato and countless other flavors, even her wildest ideas are salvageable.

“I think most crazy ideas I have, I can figure some way to make it work, even if it ends up far from my original idea,” said Fram.

This iterative process is what keeps her engaged. After around a decade of flourishing in high-pressure environments, Fram has found a place where that intensity converges with her appreciation of food as an art.

“Test kitchen feels like working in a draft. The pressure of it is stressful, but also where I thrive.”

And she has thrived, for three years and counting.

“There was a point where I thought that I would run out of ideas, but if anything, I have more ideas than ever,” said Fram.

Unbelievably, she has yet to create a tiramisu or cookie dough flavor, but is looking forward to doing so.

“Some of these flavors that are a little more obvious, I get some performance anxiety about them because there are so many ways to do it,” said Fram.

That hesitation feels almost ironic coming from someone who has already made incredible ice cream out of garlic, pine needles, and squash. But maybe that’s the point: the stranger flavors leave more room to invent the rules yourself. So while Fram works up the courage to tackle the classics, I’ll keep watching the weekly drops for something a little less obvious. And, for entirely selfish reasons, I’d like to formally put Green Bean up for consideration.