Small Batch Ice Cream – Page 4

April 11, 2013

Bee Pollen

It isn’t often that we release a flavor that rides alone – one ingredient – no further augmentations. I can only think of a handful, out of the one hundred or so flavors that we’ve released over the past two years, since starting this here blog. Those that come to mind: Black Walnut, Fennel Pollen, Tomato, and of course, Triple Chocolate. There comes a time when we just want to know how certain flavors taste, on their own, in ice cream. Well, this week is one of those times. We chose one ingredient to ride alone – Bee Pollen!

This is bee pollen. When a worker bee lands on a flower, it gathers the dusty pollen from the plant. This dust sticks to the back of their legs, and the bee then uses it’s head, along with it’s nectar, to pack down the pollen dust, forming these bee pollen granules. They carry the pollen back to the hive where it is used as protein/food for the colony. Bee keepers have devised ways to knock the pollen off of the bees legs as it enters the hive, therefore bringing these pollen granules to market. Bee pollen is readily sold as a nutritional supplement, as it has been said to be very nutritious and claimed to cure certain health problems. Scientific research over the years has not confirmed this.

So now that you know the basics of bee pollen, let’s make ice cream with it, ok? The different colored granules symbolize the variety of plants the bee visited, which will effect it’s unique aroma and flavor. It’s flavor is sweet and nutty. We steeped the pollen in our standard cane sugar ice cream base, give it a generous salting, and strained through a fine mesh strainer before churning. That’s it!

Bee Pollen Ice Cream!

It’s sweet, creamy, nutty, honey-esk. It’s unique! And that’s why we needed to throw this one out there for a good ‘ol solo run.

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 4/12 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!

April 4, 2013

Roasted Banana w/ Rum Mango Syrup

We’ve been on a tropical kick since January, and with the winter clinging to life with its cold dead hands, we’ve got no reason to stop now. The basis of this flavor began with a beautiful ripe Kent mango that called my name at on a recent grocery run.

I nabbed it up knowing I wanted to use it as an element for a flavor, hoping it would conjure a few ideas while it ripened just a bit further on the kitchen shelf.

Conjure it did, and as soon as I saw this little bottle of dark rum in the cabinet I knew it was going to be combined with the mango to make a syrup for the ice cream.

The only question remaining: what kind of ice cream this was going to swirl into? My answer came when I noticed these two slightly overripe bananas hanging in the fruit basket.

We used bananas a few weeks back for the first time, though we’ve been discussing them for well over a year. They make an amazing companion for rum and mangoes.

These two were roasted in a pan with some butter to caramelize the sugars and intensify the banana flavor.

The bananas were pureed with cream and steeped in the organic cane sugar ice cream base to infuse the roasty banana flavor through and through.

Last but not least, this beautiful rum mango syrup is swirled into the pint as the ice cream is packed in.

What we end up with is a silky smooth roasted banana ice cream, swirled with bright yellow ribbons of rum mango syrup.

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 4/5 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!

March 28, 2013

Horchata w/ Cajeta

A few weeks back, we released our Coconut Bar w/ Banana Caramel, a flavor inspired by a mid-winter trip to Mexico and the coconut bar from the gods. This week, it’s another Mexican-inspired flavor, as we craft a rice milk ice cream and a goat milk caramel made with local goat milk from our faves, Singing Hills Goat Dairy. Let’s get started with this week’s flavor: Horchata with Cajeta!

Before we assume that everyone has had Horchata, let me just give you a brief run down. It’s really good and tasty. Ok, are we good then? I mean it, but seriously, Horchata is a beverage that is found in many Latin American countries along with Spain. It’s made in many different ways using either ground rice, seeds, almonds, etc. Probably the most commonly found version of Horchata here in the US is the Mexican version; which utilizes ground rice, water, milk, sugar, cinnamon and sometimes vanilla. For our ice cream base, we used long grain white rice pictured above. We pureed the rice in a blender with our cream, added a few cinnamon sticks and let steep overnight in the refrigerator. We make our organic cane sugar base, add the strained rice cream and a touch of ground cinnamon, and our mix is ready for the churn.

Next, it’s time to make our Cajeta. Cajeta? It’s a Mexican caramel/syrup made by slowly simmering milk and sugar for a long period of time. This isn’t going to be just any ordinary Cajeta though…we’re making a goat milk cajeta with Singing Hills goat milk. Lynne Reeck and Kathryn Wall are Singing Hills’ owners. In our opinions, they are making the best fresh goat cheese around. “Like” them on Facebook, go buy their cheese at Mill City Farmers Market, Fulton Farmers Market, and Kingfield Farmers Market, and check out this great article about them from Heavy Table(Lynne Reeck of Singing Hills Goat Dairy). And please, help support our local farmers.

Thanks to them, and of course Lynne’s sister Nancy, for her door-to-door delivery, we got our hands on a quart of their tasty goat milk for Cajeta-making. The sugar, goat milk and cinnamon stick are mixed and brought to a simmer.

For comparison sake, I wanted you all to see the transformation of the Cajeta over a 60-80 minute period of simmer down. It’s color becomes darker and darker until finally the Cajeta has reached full caramelization.

Singing Hills Cajeta! It kind of makes me speechless it’s so good. It’s much different from a traditional caramel. It’s lighter, and has a beautiful clean finish, with a slightly tangy acidity to it. It’s something we hope to have around a lot in years to come as our business grows. The Cajeta gets layered into the pints during packaging.

Boom! Horchata with Cajeta! Creamy rice milk ice cream layered with Singing Hills goat milk caramel. It’s a little bit of Mexico and Minnesota all in one pint.

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 3/29 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!

March 21, 2013

Irish Soda

OK fine – so we’re a little late to the St. Patrick’s Day parade, but this flavor was dreamt up in the spirit of the green day of drinking, and we’re going to post it anyway. We’ve been scheming beer flavors quite a bit over the last few months and released one of our first a few weeks back with the Brown Ale and Bacon Marmalade ice cream. The original plan for this pint of ice cream was an irish drink using a Guinness base, but the rest of the ingredients ended up changing at the last minute, a decision possibly influenced by a pint (or two) of Guinness.

While preparing a meal of Corned Beef and Cabbage for ourselves and the rest of the Froz family oe’r the weekend, we snacked on this wonderful Irish soda bread along with some Irish cheddar from the Seward Co-op. Actually, I should rephrase that for factual accuracy -“while Erik prepared a fantastic irish meal of Corned Beef and Cabbage for the rest of us”….anyway, back to the story.

We enjoyed the soda bread so much, we decided to lay waste to the orignal plans and make it a co-star of this week’s flavor with the Guinness base.

Like we’ve done many many times before, we cube the soda bread, toss it in butter and sugar, and bake it into crunchy little croutons to add the textural element to the ice cream. It’s like having an ice cream cone built in, except this ice cream cone is made of Irish Soda bread and tastes really good.

The base of the ice cream was none other than everyone’s favorite Irish stout. To flavor the ice cream we reduce the beer down with some sugar and create an extract of sorts, then mix it in to our standard ice cream base.

Magically delicious. A malty Guinness ice cream studded with crunchy bits of irish soda bread. We call it Irish Soda.
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 3/22 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!

March 7, 2013

Caramel Popcorn Candied Almond

Its been awhile since we’ve done a collaboration, so we’re excited to be back at it with none other than Twin Cities fantastic Stephanie Meyer. When she isn’t running her spectacular blog Fresh Tart, she’s writing for Andrew Zimmern’s Kitchen Adventures on FoodandWine.com, contributing to Minneosta Monthly, and can generally be found somewhere around town, cooking, taking photos, writing, dining or all of the above. Let’s just say she’s scrubbed laziness from the Thesaurus. Anyway, we met a few years back and our mutual passion for all things food quickly had us scheming on flavors. Talks of collaboration on a flavor followed, so I asked Steph to send us some of her current favorite flavors or ingredients as a catalyst for this collab. An email returned to my inbox with the following:

Popcorn

Almonds

Caramel

Brown Butter

There were more potential flavors on this list, but these were the only ones that I saw. Translation: Poppycock! At least that’s how I first imagined it – popcorn (awesome) and nuts (even better) all covered in caramel and/or toffee (party). We were going to hearken back to one of our first flavors on this blog -Brown Butter Popcorn – and make a Poppycock version of it. Time to make some ice cream.

First. The popcorn. Popcorn is a mutual staple in Steph’s and our households and we’re both fans of flavoring it with brown butter. It was an obvious choice as the main elements of the ice cream base.

The first step in making this particular base is taking fresh pan popped pop corn, not microwave popcorn, or air popped, but popped old school in a pot with hot oil. Why? Because you get the most natural, classic popcorn flavor from the oil cooking the corn over heat. Microwave popcorn is totally out of the question for many reasons, (no thanks butter “flavor”) and airpopped just won’t provide enough oomph. Once it’s popped, we pulverized it in a blender and then mixed into the base and steeped to extract as much of the flavor into the cream as possible.

While the base is heating/steeping, brown butter is whisked in. The brown butter is such an incredible flavor on its own, and combined with salt makes the popped corn flavor much more prevalent, which is exactly what we want.

Boiling sugar.

For this flavor we’re sticking with a classic caramel – with plenty of salt.

We chose to candy the almonds whole, since the true prize of poppycock is the toffee coated nuts. The caramel is swirled into the brown butter popcorn base and the nuts are peppered throughout.

The moral of the story? Ice Cream is just as right for a cold, snowy night in March as it is a warm dusk in late June. Popcorn, Brown Butter, Almonds, Caramel mean victory. This one is a champ. A buttery, popcorn infused ice cream with heaps of whole, candied almonds and ribbons of salty, gooey caramel.

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 3/8 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!