Small Batch Ice Cream – Page 15

March 1, 2012

Miso Black Sesame

Winter is the season for many things in Minnesota, one of them being soup. It got me thinking about somehow incorporating one of Winters great pleasures with one of Summers great pleasures…ICE CREAM!

I’ve been reading a new cookbook I received as a birthday gift, and it has inspired new ideas and thoughts pertaining to cooking that are refreshing. For those of us into cooking, I think it is common to get a new book, and obsess over it for a few weeks or even months. So that’s where I’m at, and although the book is not a cookbook of Asian influence, it opened my mind to work with something I hadn’t thought about in ice cream before…Miso.

This is white Miso paste, aka “shiromiso” purchased at United Noodles in Minneapolis. If you have never been or are interested in Asian cooking, United Noodles is the bomb digity. It’s the largest Asian grocery in the Midwest. Go there!

Traditionally Miso is made from fermented rice, soybeans and/or barley mashed into a paste with salt. It originated in Japan and is used to season soups, sauces, vegetables, etc. If you’ve eaten at a Japanese restaurant you’ve likely seen Miso soup on the menu, if not slurped one down.

It’s flavor will be different depending on the type of Miso you buy, but the white Miso we used here has a sweet, salt, nutty flavor that is reminiscent of Parmigiano-Reggiano…deeeeelish.

Here we have Black Sesame Seeds, much like the more common variety of pale sesame. They get toasted and tossed in toward the end of the churn. They round out this flavor offering another dimension of nuttiness to the already nutty Miso.

Miso Black Sesame Ice Cream! It’s one of the great pleasures of all seasons in FrozBroz country.

Like to try some? As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (3/2/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!

February 16, 2012

Fennel with Candied Orange

We are in prime time citrus season right now, and you’d better take advantage of it if you haven’t already. Oranges are so ripe and mouth watering right now that we really wanted to feature a flavor that made the orange pop. We wanted to get a concentrated orange flavor into the ice cream naturally, and after much thought, we decided our best route would be to candy the rind.

One the other side of the spectrum, we needed a good pairing. We’ve been toiling over making a Fennel flavored base ever since we dropped our Almond Green Anise with Figs flavor last Fall. This seemed like the opportune time to showcase a fennel based ice cream paired with seasonal oranges.

Organic Navel Oranges and Fennel. Everyone knows oranges, but fennel is a mystery to a lot of people. It can be eaten raw or cooked. In its raw form, fennel has a sweetness with a subtle anise flavor. When cooked, the anise flavor becomes even more tenuous, to the point that if you are not a fan of anise flavor, you wouldn’t hardly know it was there. For this batch, we cook the fennel.

One of my favorite ways to prepare Fennel is to braised it in butter, stock and lemon juice. It then gets finished with a glaze of the braising liquid and grated Parmesan.

For the ice cream, we chopped up our Fennel bulb and toss it in our cream. We did a short braise, allowed the mixture to cool, and then strained out the Fennel chunkers.

The final product is a complex Fennel cream base that becomes the backbone to this flavor.

Next, we peel the rind off of the oranges, chop ’em, cover with water, bring to a boil, strain, and repeat a few more times. This process slowly reduces the bitterness of the rind. They then get simmered down with a simple syrup of sugar and water, then strained and tossed with sugar. In the end we are left with natural candied orange that we throw into the ice cream at the end of the churn.

This is it folks – Fennel with Candied Orange. The sweet fennel cream with a chewy orange punch is something you won’t find at another ice cream shop. You saw it here first.

Like to try some? As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (2/17/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!

February 9, 2012

Maple French Toast with Apricot

Sometimes the biggest treats are only that because of their timing.

As a kid, my mother’s call to dinner was always veiled in a bit of mystery. I rarely paid attention to what was being made, being much more consumed with horsing around with siblings and friends outside or earning the hard money on my after school paper route.

Hunger was a guarantee, and when presented the ever feared cabbage hotdish, a hunger that was guaranteed to linger. But once in awhile, when my mom had exhausted her pantry or simply needed to use something up, that pre-supper time famish was met with the greatest gift of all: breakfast.

Sometimes it was pancakes, others it was scrambled eggs and bacon – and if we hit the jackpot, it was french toast. It was a small victory that engraved itself in my head, and eating a plate of french toast now hearkens the joy of seeing that pile of egg bread on my dinner plate as a kid.

After earning my own french toast stripes with a picky eating three year old of my own, it was time to get this idea into some cream.

There’s something therapeutic about dredging bread in egg. Not sure what. Once everyone’s had their fill the rest (4-5 slices) of the french toast is diced up, baked off and transformed into crunchy little nuggets of breakfast goodness – ready to be bathed in fresh cream.

Ready….

For some added dimension we used these dried apricots from the Seward Co-Op, so sweet they could gag honey, minced into small pieces and tossed in as a dancing partner for our favorite breakfast bread.

Giant fruit candy.

To finish, the french toast croutons and minced apricots are tossed in to the base, and some of our friend maple syrup is added in right at the end to bring the flavor to fruition.

Wild Country Maple Syrup from Lutsen, MN.

Maple French Toast Apricot.

Like to try some? As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (2/10/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!

February 2, 2012

Oat with Maple Brown Sugar

Since we got the breakfast creams started last week, we decided, why not keep a good thing going. This is our second installment of breakfast flavors that are really inspired by the season. The sun is still low in the sky, and all anyone wants to do is lay in bed a little longer, drink coffee, and slowly work your way to making a comforting breakfast. Of course, all while wearing pajamas.

Oats are not something that we’ve used in our ice cream before. They are high in starch content, and in our past experiences, vegetables high is starch pose bigger challenges to balance texture. In the case of oats, we have found a starch match made in heaven for our ice cream.

These are the organic regular rolled oats that we purchase at our haunt, The Seward Coop, from Whole Grain Milling Company located in Welcome, MN.

Welcome to our ice cream base oats. This is when the magic starts to happen. We slowly bring our base to a simmer with the oats, and then allow to steep for a few hours. During this cooking/steeping process the oats release their starches into our ice cream base; the same starches that make oatmeal so delicious and creamy. The base gets strained through a fine sieve before getting churned in the maker.

The oats provide a subtle flavor profile that is so familiar yet is almost forgotten because of the texture take over of it’s starches.

This is Wild Country Maple Syrup from Lutsen, MN. We incorporate it with some brown sugar and bring it to a quick simmer.

The uncaramelized maple brown sugar sauce is reminiscent of the graininess that brown sugar and maple syrup have when stirred into hot oatmeal. We layer the sauce into the pints.

The starch match made in heaven results in a rich, dense, ultra smooth ice cream with a sweet mapley sauce layered in.

Like to try some? As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (2/03/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!

January 26, 2012

Chicory Belgian Waffle

This flavor in particular was inspired by a good friend of ours, Chef Karla Schmitt who gave us our first opportunity to bring our ice cream (in its very early stages) to the public.

In one of our first meetings with Karla, she explained a dessert she hoped to serve revolving around Beignets and Chicory. The original idea was to serve the famous New Orleans pastry with a Chicory ice cream. Her fantastic idea led us down the path to discovering Chicory as one of our favorite ice cream flavors.

Chicory is better known for its close relatives more famous to most people as Belgian Endive, Radicchio – two favorites across the globe for salads, grilling, and braising. The Chicory we use for our ice cream is root chicory used most commonly when roasted and ground to be a coffee substitute.

In this case, we’ve found a French Chicory that has a great complex chicory flavor and is available as an extract – perfect for incorporating into our base.

It is coffee like in its flavor – but claims more of a bold cocoa and caramel flavor that is has a fantastic depth which works amazingly well for ice cream. For this particular idea, we took Karla’s dessert plate and combined it into a single ice cream, substituting Beignets for Belgian waffles.

Who doesn’t like waffles?

The trick with this flavor is similar to many of the former we’ve posted and developed – waffles in their original state are too frail and contain too much moisture to hold up in an ice cream base.

So as you’ve seen us do before – we dice the waffles into small cubes, and bake them off to provide a crunchy waffle like crouton that holds up and retains its texture while retaining the honest waffle flavor.

Add waffle bits, and that is that. A deeply complex coffee caramel ice cream studded with crunchy bits of Belgian waffle.

Time for breakfast!
Like to try some? As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (1/27/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!