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Apple Fritter Apple Fritter

The apple fritter is one of the best things ever fried by man.

A few weeks ago, I attended a breakfast which happened to include a glorious platter full of a wide variety of donuts.  Cake donuts , Raised donuts, Crullers, Bismarcks…the gamut.   Only one problem. Actually a major problem.  There was only one apple fritter sitting on top of that pile, like an anchor keeping the rest from floating away, and before my gluttonous brain had time to signal my hands into action, it was gone.

The loss instantly triggered a quest for top notch fritters in the Twin Cities, and a recent jackpot trip to Mel-O-Glaze in South Minneapolis found me standing in front of a pile of them “fresh out the fryer”.

However, the plans for them mostly included ice cream.  Truthfully that was the only plan. The goal was to see if we could make an ice cream that fully and accurately represented all of the goodness that is the Apple Fritter.  Which meant more than just simply throwing chunks of them into a cream.

It also had to pay off some of the willpower it was going to take to not eat my way through the bag I just bought.

 

 

I will repeat: willpower.

 

 

 

 

As we do in many of our flavors that incorporate a baked good, a few of these fritters were cubed and baked off in the oven until they were dried out and crunchy.  Unfortunately, this process actually made them even better, and harder to resist.

 

 

 

Little nuggets of pure gold.

 

 

 

As you might remember from the Apple Crisp flavor a few weeks back, we had some fantastic heirloom Wolf River apples we roasted and as it happened there were a few left.  A nice little extra apple flavor to pair with the fritter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally my favorite part – the last of the fritters were thrown into the cream base, to take a nice long bath and leech all of their apple frittery essence into the base.

 

 

 

This is where the Apple Fritter gets doubled up.

 

 

 

 

What we ended up with was nothing but apple fritter.  Apple fritter ice cream, littered with chunks of roasted apples and apple fritter croutons.

And as every week previous, you can win one of two available pints of this weeks 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 (11/4/2011) 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!

 

 

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Ginger Cashew Honey

One of the best parts of making all of this ice cream is meeting the local farmers and food purveyors.  There are so many fascinating stories and interesting people with a passion for food, we really would have to try to NOT be inspired.

A perfect example of this is the folks from Nordeast Nectars.

 

 

Nordeast was born out of updates in Minneapolis City ordinance allowing residents to keep bees within city limits.

 

 

 

The modern day bee is a vital cog in nature’s food chain and is rapidly dwindling in numbers. The rise in use of pesticides and factory farming has nearly choked the American honey bee out of its natural, rural habitat and American farmers are now having to import them to acheive  successful pollination.

Believe it or not, honeybees are finding a happier home in cities where flowering plants aren’t covered in five kinds of weed and pest killer.  Nordeast Nectars is making a point to champion urban bee keeping, and will be doing some really fantastic things in the next few years to do their part in repairing the bee population .  Lucky for us, they’ve taken their passion for giving honeybees a place to thrive and made some of the best, and most unique tasting honey around.

Needless to say when we got our hands on one of these amber jars of beauty, ice cream wasn’t far behind.

What goes good with honey?  Actually just about anything, but especially nuts.  And we just happened to have a pile of cashews that were dying for attention.

 

 

Not so fast..

 

 

 

 

Rather than just throw handfuls of these into our base, we decided to double down and make a ginger cashew butter to provide a nice hearty cashew flavor.

 

 

 

Smooth.

 

 

 

We incorporated this fresh ginger cashew butter into the cream and threw in a bunch of salty, crunchy cashew chunks at the end.

As the ice cream was packed into the pint containers, that incredible Nordeast Nectars honey was swirled in, creating luscious little pockets of floral goodness.

 

And as every week previous, you can win one of two available pints of this weeks 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 (10/21/2011) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. Our only condition is you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis. Good luck!

 

 

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Apple Crisp with Sharp Cheddar

At some point while I was in high school I learned of the apple pie and sharp cheddar combination.  I was at a family dinner at my grandparents house when one of my uncles sat down at the table with a piping hot piece of my Grandmother’s freshly made apple pie – with a big slice of cheese slowly melting over the top.

Being used to only eating Apple pie with ice cream, this completely blew my mind.  Apple pie with…cheese?  I had to try it.  Once I did – I was hooked.  It was a flavor combination that was relatively foreign to me at the time, but as I grew older and realized how well fruit and cheese went together, it all made sense.

In this batch, we used some gorgeous Wolf River heirloom apples from our pal Slim LeDuc.

 

 

I don’t know what it is about gnarly looking fruit trees, but I like to imagine that the flavor of the fruit is so great it overwhelms the plant.

 

 

 

 

These babies were large and nice for slicing up and baking, but had thin skin and made for great eating on their own as well.

 

 

 

It was my first experience with Wolf River apples, and their sweet flavor lived up to their large size.

 

 

 

The apples were diced, tossed in cinnamon and sugar, and roasted in the oven to concentrate their flavor and reduce their water content.

 

 

 

These were very snack-able.

 

 

 

Since we’ve obviously already strayed from the traditional apple pie route, i chose to make more of a “crisp”  topping to throw in the ice cream with the apples – except this one is heavily concentrated with crushed, roasted pecans instead of the more commonly used oats.

 

 

And there’s much larger chunks than in traditional apple crips, to ensure there are some substantial bites in the ice cream.

 

 

 

Last but not least, rougly grated and chopped Sharp Wisconsin Cheddar cheese is added.  The cheddar provides a quick tangy back drop to the ice cream, and pairs incredibly well with both the apples and the pecan crisp.  Our Wisconsin blood has us constantly striving to find more ways to get dairy into your dairy.

 

 

 

Cheesy.

 

 

 

The end result is a fantastic ice cream, filled with roasted heirloom apples, crisp pecan crust, and good old Wisconsin cheese.  Hard to beat.

 

 

 

 
You can win one of two available pints this week, 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 (10/7/2011) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. Our only condition is you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis. Good luck!

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Black Pepper Grape Syrup, Pita Cracker and Chevre

Our second installment of flavors inspired by Minnesota Peach, the  farm of fruit genius Dave Griffin, located outside of Cold Spring, MN .  Watch this video and get a great idea of what we’re talking about here: http://vimeo.com/27403794 .

We had a chance to visit a few weeks ago, and Dave gave us the full tour of his farm where he grows plums, apricots, cherries, hazelnuts, black walnuts, a variety of veggies and probably most importantly — where is he is working hard at breeding a hearty peach that can survive the harsh Minnesota winter.  Last but not least he has, by his estimation, somewhere around 50 varieties of grapes.  We tasted so many grapes our heads were spinning, and it was hard to comprehend all of the flavor.

 

 

 

Dave was generous enough to send us home with a bounty to work with, and we went right to it:

 

 

 

 

It was intimidating to make sure our experimenting didn’t result in a waste. When you witness the passion and heart that a farmer puts into bringing food to your table, you really realize just how valuable that food is.

back to the grapes..

 

 

The beginning of our flavor brainstorming was to use a blend of varieties- Baltics, Concord, Muscat (and a few others I unfortunately can’t remember) to make a rich syrup which would be somehow used in a flavor.

 

 

 

On the way home from the farm I stopped to find some ingredients to pair with the grape syrup and ran across this beautiful chevre from Donnay farms.

 

 

No, you do not notice a knife swipe in the top of this.  Purely your imagination.

 

 

 

 

It was at this point where I got a little worried I was going down the wrong path with the chevre – so I decided to make the grape syrup and take some time to think.

 

 

Here is the gorgeous syrup produced from the Minnesota Peach grapes, with a little black pepper to add some depth.

 

 

 

 

Finally the thinking paid off and I turned a HolyLand pita in to a cracker to finish up the combination and bridge the gap between the grape syrup and the chevre.

 

 

 

Crunchy. Salty.

 

 

 

The final outcome: Black Pepper Grape Syrup swirled in with Pita Crackers and Chevre

You can win one of two available pints this week — leave a comment on our facebook page  to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, make your comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (9/23/2011) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. Our only condition is you must be able to pick it up. Good luck!

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