Spiced Nuts

We’re continuing our holiday flavor tour this week with another nut infused ice cream. We got inspired back in October with our Black Walnut ice cream, and since, have been on a nut-infused ice cream making rampage. To go along with our holiday theme, we thought we would make a mixed bag and spice it up a little bit. After all, who doesn’t love a holiday party with a bowl of spiced nuts on the table? Let’s get this holiday party started right with this week’s flavor: Spiced Nuts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nuts! Raw nuts! From light to dark: Cashews, Almonds, Pecans. These make up the backbone of this flavor adding both rich flavors and creamy texture with all those natural nut oils.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First things first, nuts get laid out on a sheet pan and into the oven for a roast. The roasting brings out all those nutty flavors we are all familiar with.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the roast, the nuts get crushed in the food processor, and then into our ice cream base for a hot steep. The mix gets chilled down in an ice bath and the crushed nuts get strained out, for a smooth nut cream base.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now that we have our nut-infused ice cream we can get down to putting some spice into those nuts. Shortly after conceiving the idea for this week’s flavor, the December issue of Food and Wine magazine showed up, and what was in it? A nice recipe for Sugar-and-Spice Nuts. We liked it so much that we decided to use the three spices used in the recipe to spice up our nut cream. Check the recipe out for yourselves right here: Sugar-and-Spice Nuts. In the picture above starting at the bottom, moving clockwise: Cayenne Pepper, Chili Powder and Cinnamon. The spices get mixed into our nut cream along with a generous salting. Into the maker for a churn.

 

 

 

 

The result is a rich creamy nut-infused ice cream with a salty sweet and ever-so-slightly spicy finish.

 

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 12/07 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!

 

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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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