Sydney Arkin grew up eating Fruit Loops for dinner.
“I just had a lot of access to sugar and no real oversight,” Arkin said, which she credits with helping her come up with all these weird, fun ice cream flavors that she creates today for her Rockridge ice cream shop: Bad Walter’s Bootleg Ice Cream.
When the pandemic hit, Arkin was working an advertising job and realized she needed a hobby with all the newfound free time. She decided to make ice cream and borrowed a friend’s ice cream maker to get started — a Cuisinart 30. She quickly upgraded to a Cuisinart Ice 100 with a built-in compressor. It became a Lello Musso 5030, and the machines only got bigger and better. Now, it’s a Carpigiani 502, a popular choice among those in the frozen treat business, and the shop counts 13 employees with Arkin as the owner, Nolan King as the production lead, and Julianne Bell as the pastry chef.
5800 College Ave., Oakland; www.badwalters.com
Open Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays 12-9:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays, 12-10 p.m.
The “Rize and Shine” flavor will be available Wed. July 23 to Sunday July 27, 2025.
The shop was named after Arkin’s husband’s dog, Walter, whom her husband adopted before meeting her. Arkin says Walter was an “asshole.” When a friend suggested she name her new business after Walter, she said she couldn’t, after all he’s an asshole, but when the friend suggested Bad Walter’s, it all came together.
Bad Walter’s opened their brick-and-mortar location almost a year ago, in September 2024, in the old Smitten location on College Avenue.
“A dream come true spot, to the point where, when Smitten went out of business, I was like, I won’t even reach out because there’s no way,” Arkin said. “It just feels really special to be here. I have a video of Walter on my phone eating ice cream right there at Smitten in 2017.”
Now a year in, they’ve created around 115 flavors — averaging one to two new flavors a week. Each flavor is lactose-free, and they always have a sorbet on the menu too for a dairy-free offering, as well as one gluten-free flavor. Arkin once created an ice cream flavor inspired by The Oaklandside’s article on Kevin, the Rockridge peacock.
(Left to right) Julianne Bell, pastry chef, Nolan King, production lead, and Sydney Arkin, owner, work together to develop the unique flavors available at Bad Walter’s Bootleg Ice Cream in Oakland. Credit: Jungho Kim for East Bay Nosh
The making of an ice cream flavor
Arkin thinks her background in advertising, not just the Fruit Loop breakfasts, helped give her the skills to create so many new flavors.
“A lot of people don’t think of advertising as creative, but when you see a really beautifully well-done ad, you see that there is creativity behind it,” Arkin said. “And I think coming from being a creative director in advertising, you find inspiration in a lot of random things. I’m used to my brain just making weird connections.”
Their flavors are unique with creative names to go with them, which Arkin said is just as important as the flavor itself.
“A name can really sell a flavor,” Arkin said. “Which is really exciting for me because that’s one of my favorite parts of the process.”
Arkin said sometimes the name comes first and the flavor follows and sometimes vice versa.
“Sexual Chocolate” was one of their first flavors when the store opened and was based on the name of the band in the film “Coming to America.” For this flavor, the name came first.
“I knew I wanted to use some sort of sexual chocolate. Okay, well, what does that look like? What makes chocolate sexual? It’s that it’s rich and it’s indulgent and sultry, and that’s when you have the dark chocolate Amarena cherries, which feels a little naughty, because that’s what you get in a cocktail, and then marshmallow fluff, that’s probably our best-selling chocolate ice cream,” Arkin said.
A portrait of Walter, the namesake of Bad Walter’s Bootleg Ice Cream, hangs on the wall in the shop in Oakland. Credit: Jungho Kim for East Bay Nosh
When Nosh visited Bad Walters, they were in the process of testing, or “R+Ding” (researching and developing) a new flavor: butter, toast, and jam. The ice cream shop had partnered with San Francisco’s Rize Up Bakery to create a brown butter sourdough ice cream with roasted strawberry jam and candied bread crumbs. For this flavor, the idea came first and the name second. Arkin got the idea after eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on some Rize Up Bakery bread, but feeling too lazy, she left out the peanut butter. Once she tasted the bread and jam combo she thought: “This could be ice cream.”
The name wasn’t finalized until right before the labels were printed Monday night. The new flavors are released every Wednesday, with this one, called Rize and Shine, releasing on Wednesday, July 23 and available through Sunday, July 27.
Arkin described creating ice cream in science terms — testing different ingredients in various amounts and ways until they find the magic balance that makes the flavor work. Sometimes, this takes many variations before getting it right; other times, they nail it after one or two tests. She started testing this flavor the week prior to Nosh’s visit, which she said tasted great but went bad.
“The thing about ice cream is that it’s different when it’s room temperature versus straight out of the freezer, which it comes out at like 20 degrees, versus when it’s fully frozen,” Arkin said. “And a lot can go wrong at every step of that process. So even if it tastes great, looks great here, it’s not necessarily going to come out that way.”
Arkin also said the best time to taste ice cream is right after it’s churned because it’s the perfect temperature for your tongue to taste all the flavors. Once the flavor is completely frozen, it will be a bit duller than the original. Because of this, she said you want to make the ice cream a little bit sweeter or saltier or just stronger nine times out of ten.
During the previous test, the brown butter Arkin used was incorporated when the ice cream was cold, so even though it was blended all together, the butter hadn’t fully emulsified in the rest of the mix, “so it came out like delicious butter,” Arkin said, “not what we were going for, but delicious.”
This week, they were trying again. First Arkin heated the liquid ice cream base — milk, cream, egg yolk, and glucose — in a pan. Then she added sugar and brought it all to temperature to emulsify and avoid the previous issue. Next, the ingredients were added to a blender with the Rize Up Bakery sourdough pieces.
Clockwise from top left: Sydney Arkin prepares the ice cream base; the mixture is put in a blender before going into the ice cream machine; strawberries are mixed with sugar for a roasted strawberry jam; and the ice cream mixture is poured into the machine. Credit: Jungho Kim for East Bay Nosh
Before tasting the flavor, Bell had a separate process for testing the best way to toast the bread in the oven. She tested it plain, with a little bit of oil, and then in a pan with the oil — which is the one that won.
Arkin let the mixture blend for a couple of minutes, making sure all of the super large bread chunks were broken apart, keeping only a little bit of that bread “specliness” as Arkin described it.
Then Arkin added the ingredients to the gelato machine. Gelato makers churn at a slower speed, she explained, which pumps less air into the ice cream, making it thicker. Arkin turned on the machine, and the ice cream churned away, taking around seven minutes to get to the right consistency. There was a little part of the machine where you could see the ice cream spin by getting thicker and thicker.
Once the ice cream has churned for a while, Arkin does a “plop test” where she lets a dollop of ice cream “plop” down onto the tray below to see if it holds its shape.
“If I put a dent in it,” she said, “it’s not going to cave in.”
A spoonful of the Rize and Shine ice cream made with Rize Up Bakery sourdough. Credit: Bad Walter’s Bootleg Ice Cream
Then, Arkin filled up a gelato pan of the brown butter sourdough ice cream, and after a quick taste herself to make sure she hadn’t messed it up, Nosh got to dive in — and it was wonderful. The creamy brown-speckled spoonful tasted just as advertised: buttery sweet sourdough bread with minuscule bread bits throughout, adding a fun texture. After trying the initial ice cream, Arkin swirled in roasted strawberries to add the finishing touch, or the “jam” to the new flavor. Bell said she roasted the strawberries for four hours, “low and slow.”
Everyone (including Nosh) tasted again after the strawberries were added, and it was delicious. The smell of the strawberries had filled the kitchen the entire time, and finally getting to bite into them with the bready ice cream was a perfect balance.
The test was a success — much to Arkin and Bell’s excitement as they shared a high-five over pulling it off in front of Nosh.
Now that they created the flavor, the next step is to try it again, fully frozen, to make sure it still tastes good at a colder temperature. Then, if it still tastes right, they scale it up. Their production process takes around four days.
“I think the collaboration between the three of us [Arkin, Bell, and King] is super cool and unique,” Arkin said. “We’re all overseeing different parts of the process. We can all add different things. And my time in advertising taught me that good ideas come from anywhere and not to ignore something because somebody who’s not a pastry chef recommended it. Everybody eats food, everybody has thoughts, everybody loves ice cream.”
To get Rize and Shine in a cup, cone, or pint, head to the shop Wednesday, July 23 through Sunday, July 27.
Look forward to their upcoming flavor collaboration next month with Uptown Oakland pizza spot Mama’s Boy, which will be announced in August — or just stop by once a week to see what new, creative flavors are added each time.
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