Minneapolis Craft Ice Cream

October 3, 2013

Red Hot Candied Apple

Its apple season, and as we rifle through our apple recipe list it becomes a bigger challenge every year to create new apple flavors. Especially considering we love love love some of our old ones. This year it was time to tackle the candied apple.

The classic cinnamon candy flavor on a candied apple – one you might also know from red hots candy or sticks of gum is Ceylon cinnamon, which is not the cinnamon most of us are used to eating in baked goods and desserts. That would be Cassia. Some call Ceylon “true cinnamon” even though its probably usurped by Cassia in usage. It’s easy to confuse the two, but their flavors could not be more different. In order to make sure this flavor accurately and truly represents that cinnamon candy flavor, we utilized Ceylon in several forms. You cannot discern the two by looking at them, but I’m going to include a picture of Ceylon cinnamon anyway. 🙂

First, the apples. We chose these beauties from Hoch orchard, diced them up, tossed them with brown sugar, butter and powdered Ceylon, and roasted them in the oven to concentrate their flavor and squeeze out the water (as we do). Then they were tossed with a little cane sugar at the end to provide a slight crunch. Parents, if you are looking for a healthy, and easy snack/almost candy/dessert for your kids (or yourself) – just these roasted apples will do the trick. But I digress, back to making ice cream.

Next, the syrup. We made our basic cinnamon syrup, but using Ceylon cinnamon instead of Cassia. For fun and for some color, I dissolved some red hots into the mix. You know, to make it legit.

The cream is made with our regular cane sugar base and infused with more ceylon cinnamon powder. The roasted apples are tossed in at the end of the churn, and the syrup is layered in as the ice cream is packed into the pint. The result is an ice cream laced with levels of ceylon cinnamon invoking that “red hot” flavor, and tart roasty chunks of apple speckled throughout each bite.

There you have it – Red Hot Candied Apple alongside our red hot new labels!

Want to try it? You can win one of the only two pints in the world, filled with this fabulous, scratch made craft ice cream in our weekly pint giveaway. Enter your name in the comments section here, or on our facebook page under the posted contest. 2 lucky winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 10/4/13 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback. Pints must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

September 19, 2013

Mint Chocolate Chip with Yellow Watermelon Swirl

This was a flavor I toiled over for months. It wasn’t supposed to be a mint chocolate chip ice cream. It was supposed to be a watermelon ice cream. I spent most of my time with this concept, trying to figure out and decide on how I wanted to do a watermelon ice cream. Then, when it finally came time to execute, I cut open the watermelon only to find out I had purchased the yellow variety. Now, that isn’t necessarily a deal breaker – yellow watermelon is incredible. But for a first watermelon excursion, it just seemed like it had to be red – that’s what everyone thinks of at first blush. So it was time to improvise. I had planned on using mint in my watermelon flavor, and after some deliberation with my frozen brother I ended up in left field. No surprise. My watermelon ice cream turned into our twist on mint chocolate chip. Not only did it work splendidly, but as fate would have it, I seemed to have ended up where I should have.

First the watermelon syrup. First they are taken apart and seeded. Then pureed and reduced over heat with sugar into a beautiful golden syrup.

The mint is pureed with some cream and then mixed into our standard ice cream base.

We found these fantastic fair trade chocolate chips at our favorite co-op and threw them in at the end of the churn – they add a good hearty crunch and chocolate punch.

The watermelon syrup is swirled in as the ice cream is packed into the pints, and the end result is pretty awesome.

Want to try it? You can win one of the only two pints in the world, filled with this fabulous, scratch made craft ice cream in our weekly pint giveaway. Enter your name in the comments section here, or on our facebook page under the posted contest. 2 lucky winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 9/20/13 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback. Pints must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

August 22, 2013

Roasted Carrot

We’re hitting our end and we’ll continue with everyone’s favorite orange root. Carrots. Harvest time carrots are the best, and there’s no other time to get that carrot-y flavor out than now. This has been one we’ve wanted to do for years, and we finally got to it on our list.

These babies are gorgeous, and I can’t get enough of them during this time of the year. We grill them, eat them raw, slice, shredded..but nothing is better than roasted in the oven. The sweetness that comes out of the carrot during this process is incredible, and was the inspiration for this flavor.

So that’s what we did. We roasted them in the oven in butter until they got all caramelly.

Then they went for a spin in the food processor, and we’re mixed into our brown sugar base. The brown sugar brings the brown butter and the roasted carrot flavor out even more.

And this is our reward – an extremely rich and creamy, roasted carrot ice cream that sings with a deep roasted caramel flavor and ends with a nice carrot kick.

Want to try it? You can win one of the only two pints in the world, filled with this fabulous, scratch made craft ice cream in our weekly pint giveaway. Enter your name in the comments section here, or on our facebook page under the posted contest. 2 lucky winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 8/23/13 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback. Pints must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

August 8, 2013

Blueberry Black Pepper Cinnamon Stripe

This time of year, our blog starts to sound like a broken record, with constant talk about the seasonal berries, and the upcoming/just starting harvest season of pretty much everything else we can grow in the midwest. And why not? For midwestern based, food obsessed fools like us, this is the greatest time of year. One that many of us take for granted, only because much of what we can grow for a month or two is available year round in grocery stores. But not too long ago, things like tomatoes, strawberries, sweet corn, watermelon…etc. were ONLY available at this time of the year, unless someone in your family was a studios canner. Even then they weren’t as good as fresh. When it all boils down to it, the excitement is part of us. The value of the harvest is in our genes. It means mother nature has cooperated for the most part and given us the gift of sustenance. For our farmers, and family it meant surviving another year. It means summer is almost over and we should eat and drink and converse in the sunset and enjoy life in the moment just this once. And all of that cheesy pillow talk aside, what it really means is second to none flavor.

So with my soliloquy over with, we’re doing another blueberry flavor this week. Because we can, and because the goodness of fresh north-woods blueberries dictates that we should. What’s different is we’re doing something we’ve never done before. A twofer. A two in one. Two kinds of ice cream that can be enjoyed separately or in harmony. What we’ll call, the stripe.

Blueberries and cinnamon are two flavors that make something special happen when they’re together. *cue the love songs* But when you have these prized local blueberries, sometimes you want to taste them on their own. Get the true flavor. Leave everything else out of it. So I chose to make two separate ice creams and pack them into the same pint, so you could do exactly that.

On a recent trip back from a weekend jaunt up north, I lucked into a blueberry stand on the main drag of Spooner, Wi. The stand was from Melton’s Blues – a place I definitely plan on going back to – and would recommend visiting. The blueberries were incredibly flavorful, and with 5 varieties to pick from, you really can’t go wrong. Check them out on Facebook right here.

I pureed and reduced the blueberries into a simple jam, and added some black pepper to provide just a tiny little bite.

The reduction was added directly into the ice cream base, to make a full on blueberry ice cream.

For the stripe, I made a simple cinnamon ice cream (a personal favorite)

To finish the job, both ice cream bases were churned simultaneously and alternately layered into the pints.

The result is literally yin and yang – rich fresh blueberry ice cream on one side, cinnamon on the other, with a tiny black pepper finish.
Want to try it? You can win one of the only two pints in the world, filled with this fabulous, scratch made craft ice cream in our weekly pint giveaway. Enter your name in the comments section here, or on our facebook page under the posted contest. 2 lucky winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 8/9/13 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback. Pints must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

July 25, 2013

Grilled Cheeseburger

Yes, really!

The whole idea of our weekly flavor was born from a challenge to ourselves, to concept and create on a regular basis, over a long term. This is how we keep our minds fresh, fuel our curiosity, make our breakthroughs and hone our skills. It also meant we would ultimately begin to challenge our own paletes, as well as our followers’ in the process. And because we’re willing to walk out on a limb here and there, we get a lot of funny suggestions for flavors. Sometimes we actually entertain them. Sometimes we don’t. In this case…

This flavor wasn’t created as a gimmick or as a joke, in fact, it was created out of pure desire to see if we could make something this far out, actually taste good. We realize that the public’s taste for Cheeseburger ice cream might be nil, but much of the point of these weekly releases are to give you an idea of our thought process when we concept, and ultimately create a flavor. Once in awhile our ideas fall flat, and those get left on the kitchen floor, never to be posted here or created at all for that matter. This one, in our opinion, did not.

It all started with a discussion on the consumption of shakes and malts while enjoying a burger and fries. Many of you willingly slurp down ice cream as a means to wash down a cheeseburger, even dipping fries in it. In some ways, the meal and the dessert are synonymous. So why wouldn’t this flavor work? We had to try.

The concept was narrowed down to a few important factors.

1. No physical meat in the final product

2. Somehow make the ice cream taste reminiscent of a grilled cheeseburger, while still allowing ice cream to be, well, ice cream

We agreed that steeping a burger would be the approach to get the flavorful fat and flavor to soak into the cream- the beef, the smoke, the char, and the cheese.

So, we had some cheeseburgers.

Obviously we start with quality ground beef, and Grass Run Farms is a good one. The burgers went on a hot charcoal grill and were topped with Wisconsin Cheddar. We ate some of the cheeseburgers. Then we took the two left over and kept them to steep in the ice cream base.

Being Wisconsin boys, we knew there had to be more cheese, so we tailored our ice cream base to accept more of this fine cheddar along with the grilled grass fed patties.

Don’t worry, we didn’t forget the bun. For this, we took our favorite New French Brioche Buns and baked them off into croutons with some help from our friends butter and salt. They went in at the end of the churn.

And here it is. A creamy, dense cheddar cheese ice cream steeped with charcoal grilled, grass fed beef patties and specked with brioche bun croutons. A sweet ice cream that ever so subtly reminds you of a cheeseburger.

Of course, you want to know – what did we think? It IS good. Honestly it wouldn’t be my first choice, and isn’t for eating in mass quantities – but its a blast to try and experience the brain tease.
Want to try it? You can win one of the only two pints in the world, filled with this fabulous, scratch made craft ice cream in our weekly pint giveaway. Enter your name in the comments section here, or on our facebook page under the posted contest. 2 lucky winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 7/25/13 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback. Pints must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!