New Custard MKE Website Is A Treat For Dessert Fans

Frozen custard. Photo by Sophie Bolich.

Mint chip, black forest torte, strawberry cheesecake — the “flavor forecast” can make or break a trip to the custard stand. But searching for the daily offerings at each location — of which there are dozens in Milwaukee County alone — can be needlessly tedious.

Enter: Noah Huotari.

Part IT professional, part dairy detective, Huotari is tackling the “first world problem” — as he puts it — of tracking down the flavor of the day at spots like Kopp’s, Gilles Frozen Custard and Bubba’s.

His website, Custard MKE, includes 18 locations throughout the Milwaukee area, with more to be added soon.

The site is designed to scrape daily updates from online postings and aggregate the results into a single, easy-to-navigate webpage. Each entry includes the featured flavor and its description. Visitors can click on individual listings for a preview of the week’s upcoming flavors.

The site also includes a searchable map that pinpoints custard stands throughout the area.

“It kind of started as solving a — what I’m gonna call it — a first-world problem of having to check more than one custard website to see what the local flavor of the day is,” said Huotari, who lives near Waukesha, within 10 minutes of “at least three” custard purveyors.

After making his way through hours of coding while juggling a full-time job, Huotari launched the initial website with just a handful of heavy-hitters. From there, he shared his creation on the Milwaukee subreddit, where it racked up more than 80 comments and hundreds of upvotes.

“It really seemed like people were very interested in it,” Huotari said. “And then I kinda learned that there’s a lot more custard places in the area than I had any idea about. I didn’t realize quite how serious Milwaukee took their custard.”

The process, though time-consuming, was relatively straightforward for Huotari, whose background in IT equipped him with the relevant experience.

Now that the website is up and running, adding new custard spots should be a piece of cake. Or rather, chocolate raspberry cheesecake, if you happen to visit Kopp’s on July 30.

Huotari will continue fine-tuning the website, with plans to add more features and make some formatting changes. He’s also working to optimize a mobile version, which is still a work in progress.

In the meantime, he has a growing list of new custard stand to try out. “I think the number one recommendation for me to add was Gilles,” he said. “So I’m gonna have to check them out.”

A glance at Thursday’s flavor lineup includes chocolate truffle, caramel cake, mint chip, blueberry cheesecake crumble and plenty more options to satisfy nearly every craving.

But what’s Huotari’s pick?

“I like them all,” he said after a lengthy pause. “Typically, my go-to is actually at Bubba’s, and it’s usually a concrete mixer with chocolate custard, M&M’s and cookie dough.”