The Ice Cream Adventure Club has begun! Here are the January 2019 flavors:
Buttermilk + Honey Cornbread Gravel
This ice cream flavor starts with a buttermilk base (it reminded some of our tasters of frozen yogurt!) with little bits of honey cornbread “gravel,” made with local Gabel Family Farm honey. We call it ‘gravel,’ because as opposed to pans of cornbread that we cut into cubes, we make and bake crumbles of a deconstructed cornbread that hold their own in the ice cream without disintegrating into the base. What is buttermilk? The term buttermilk traditionally referred to the liquid that was left behind after churning butter, but now more commonly refers to the creamy and tangy fermented milk that we are used to. The characteristic cultured taste is created by lactic acid bacteria, and this acidity reacts with baking soda to release carbon dioxide, which makes it a great (and delicious!) way to leaven baked goods.
The Cosmos
January in Alaska is a time where days are still dominated by darkness, but the night sky can be incredibly deep and magical — from Aurora Borealis to stars that we forgot about during summer. This Cosmos flavor is like a multi-sensory journey through the universe. It starts with a dark chocolate and activated charcoal base, made with two different kinds of cocoa powder as well as 100% dark baking chocolate. Inside, we swirl a homemade blue marshmallow fluff, naturally dyed with butterfly pea flower tea. (For a fun time, we recommend squirting a tiny bit of lemon juice on the fluff to observe some other neat chemical properties of the tea.) The flavor is finished off with shards of homemade Pop Rocks chocolate bark! Let the chocolate linger and melt on your tongue for a magical sensation.
We also like this flavor as a tribute to the NASA fly-by mission from the start of 2019, in which the spacecraft New Horizons captured images of the most distant body ever viewed by humans. If you haven’t seen photos of Ultima Thule, the icy ‘snowman-shaped’ world a billion miles beyond Pluto, check them out and read more here!
*Bonus*: Grapefruit Sorbet cup
We love this flavor because it’s so bright and refreshing, not to mention beautiful! We squeezed tons of fresh ruby red grapefruit and threw in a splash of local Anchorage Distillery Aurora Gin — this helps the sorbet stay soft and scoopable even when frozen, and lends it a minor underlying herbal note. This sorbet seems like the kind of flavor you could plop into something bubbly for a festive occasion.
