Malted Caraway and Molasses

Yeah, you read it right, Caraway.

It often falls into the love or hate category, most often found in breads, stews, curries, and sauerkraut.

What does caraway have to do with malt? And why in the hell did you put it in ice cream?  Perfectly logical questions.

Our thought process: Malts and ice cream go hand in hand.   So we started looking into what it would take to make our own malt powder, which is a process of drying and sprouting and re-drying cereal grains to turn the starch into sugar and give it that famous nutty malt taste we love in beer, and ice cream malts.

Then, for fun, we decided to try and make malt with some other, less conventional ingredients. Caraway seemed like a fun choice- our challenge and hope was we could mellow out the blatant caraway flavor by putting it through a “cheater” malt process.

 

 

Once it was dried out, soaked, and dried again, we ground it into a dark, fine, almost coffee like powder……

Malted Caraway

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and then we paired it with molasses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As it often happens, we don’t really know how the flavor will turn out until it has cured properly.   A lot can change in the taste over the course of the first three days in the freezer.  To our pleasant surprise, the end product was an incredibly complex, malt flavor, with dark flecks of malted, powdered caraway which come out right at the finish. Its become one of our favorites.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wonder what it tastes like?

 

 

 

This chap won’t even eat pizza, and he thinks its fantastic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Be the first to ask for a pint here and its yours. We’ll be giving another two pints away this week, one here, and one on our Facebook page. All you have to do is ask. Seriously. Free, craft ice cream, a flavor you can’t get anywhere else, made with ingredients from local farms.

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Brown Butter Popcorn

Around a year ago, I found myself snooping around the kitchen on a Friday night looking for ingredients I had on hand to mix up a new flavor. Often times, trying to find creativity with a multitude of options at the grocery store can be self defeating, and I’ll end up defaulting to something I know rather than coming up with a new idea. Since the stores were already closed anyway, I opted to force myself to create with what I had at my disposal. Using this method can definitely up the “weirdness ratio” as far as flavors of ice cream are concerned, but every once in awhile we hit on something.

 

In this instance, the decision ended up being Popcorn. We’ve had success with both roasted and fresh sweet corn ice cream late in the summer, and our cornbread ice cream has always been well received, so why not try another variety?

 

I popped a fresh batch on the range, pureed it (pureed popcorn is interesting on its own –  a substance that kind of resembled Styrofoam)  and went about figuring out how to make the ice cream taste like popcorn without having to navigate the chewy kernels.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While Caramel corn was a tempting idea, and one that we’ll probably pursue in the future, we chose to go with a straight up popcorn flavor. However, as a twist we decided to add some brown butter to the base to bring out a little more of the nutty/buttery flavor popcorn gets from popping in a pan.  Oh..and maybe add a little extra fat.

 

 

 

 

We ended up with a near perfect match. As we do every week, we’re giving away a pint of this weeks flavor, so be the first to comment here or on our Facebook page and you can judge for yourself.

 

 

 

 

 

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Gingerbread

This seemingly endless winter got me thinking of the gingerbread my mom used to make when I was a kid. We always used to eat it warm with a big scoop of homemade whipped cream on top. It was hard to beat the comfort of the warm gingerbread melding with the cream. We didn’t have it that often as kids, but it has always been one of my sleeper favorites. Finding a way to make this an ice cream has been on my mind the last few weeks, and seemed like a natural combination. Thankfully my mom happily turned over the Gingerbread recipe and we were on our way.

Within a couple hours, I had a piping hot loaf of gingerbread, just like moms used to make.

 

These babies needed to be substantial in the mix, so it seemed right to cube them and bake them off a bit more to make sure they retain their flavor but didn’t get soggy in the batter.

 

Crunchy, chewy gingerbread croutons, ready to do their thing…all of those little crumbs, collateral damage from being tossed on the pan, baked much quicker and became more carmalized in the process. That flavor couldn’t go to waste and added a nice subtle, dimension to the overall flavor of the final product.

 

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Left the cream base unflavored (other than sugar) to duplicate the clean taste of whipped cream.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gave those little gingerbread croutons a spin in the batter..

 

 

 

 

 

 

Froz.

 

It turned out exactly as we were hoping.  Leaving vanilla or any other flavors out of the base gave the ice cream  the pure cream taste we were looking for, and let the plentiful, crunchy chunks of gingerbread do all of the work.  Seems like it would make a great Christmas time scoop, but equally appropriate for right now as far as I’m concerned.

Inspiration of the motherly kind…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a lot of baking involved in making our ice cream, and we both drew lucky straws with mothers who are fantastic bakers in their own right.  However, there’s no chance involved in the amount of inspiration our ice cream making has drawn from desserts our mothers made for us as kids.  With the launch of our site , and more importantly mother’s day coming up, it only seems right that our next few flavors pay some homeage to the wonderful women that got us started on this journey.  New flavors coming tomorrow. Stay tuned.


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