batch®

What better way to celebrate the Year of the Dragon than with some Green Tea or Ginger ice cream?  Happy Chinese New Year!

MOO.  No, not that MOO.  I’m talking MOO business cards. We decided to forgo the conventional route and (ironically) get these mini-cards.  You can MOO too – check out their site and then have all sorts of fun creating different designs for the backs of your business card.  And when you run into someone else with a MOO card, you’ll feel this weird connection.

So, what would you like on the backs of your business card?

And we have a new flavor – Green Tea!  We make this with matcha.  Know what matcha is?  If so, then great and you’re up on what we’re up to here.  If not, let me explain what matcha is.  Matcha is shaded green tea leaves that are finely milled into a powder (like in the above picture.)  This stuff is great for you by the way, but I digress, ’cause you know, we’re talking about ice cream here.  Anyway, we worked with the tea experts at Somerville based MEM Tea to find an exquisite matcha for our ice cream.  (Big thanks to Gilbert over there!) Our creamy base along with this matcha results in a delectable tea flavor with a fabulous (and real!) color.

All Fall we have been working to finish up the recipe and roll this out.  Finally, with much excitement, we made the inaugural batch last week.  It will be rolled out to a few stores initially, starting at this week. Look for updates on our Facebook page and/or Twitter accounts for which stores will carry it first.  After that, it will continue to be rolled out to more stores.  If this is a flavor you want and your store of choice does not carry it, ask them to start carrying it!

Once you have a chance to try it, be sure to let us know what you think of this newest flavor – either on here, on our Facebook page, or on our Twitter account.

Oh, and want to know more about matcha? Bon Appetit did a 2 page spread on it in their October issue – here’s a link to an abbreviated online version.

It’s a local food extravaganza tomorrow at the Boston Local Food Fest!   We can’t wait as we had such a great time participating in it last year.  This is the place to be tomorrow…to eat like there’s no tomorrow.  The lineup of participating vendors is just fantastic – everyone from local chocolate maker Vianne Chocolat to Vermont Smoke & Cure to food trucks like Red Bones to restaurants like Sofra Bakery and more. Check out the entire list of food vendors here.  Additionally, there will be all sorts of demonstrations – butchering/cooking/pickling/eating local foods etc. to keep you more than entertained as you chow down.

This is a FREE event from 11am-5pm.  Every food item will be priced under $5. It’s next to the Children’s Museum on the Boston Waterfront at Fort Point Channel.

There were thousands of people last year, and they expect even more this year. So your best bet is to come by means other than car – like walk, bike, or by MBTA – it’s on the T’s red line (South Station) and silver line (Court House Station).  Consult the Getting There info on the BLFF site.

Come by & see us tomorrow!

Food Trucks have The Great Food Truck Race.  Pig-loving chefs have Cochon 555.  We have the Ice Cream Showdown!  You can bet we’re bringing salted caramel to this event (as well as another flavor)!  This is year #3 of this event, and it’s on Sunday, Sept 11 from 4-6pm at the Community Boathouse in Boston.  Ticket proceeds go to two really worthy local organizations – Lovin’ Spoonfuls and Community Servings.

For more details and how to buy tickets, click here

See you there!

Image credit: Eat Boston

Even Mayor Menino wants in on the salted caramel….

We don’t have a bacon ice cream, so what’s the next best thing?  Taking part in a Pig, Beer, and Ice Cream BBQ event! How does our salted caramel with pig sound?  Throw in some beer, and it’s a shindig not to be missed!  Come on down to the Sam Adams Brewery in Jamaica Plain on Sunday, June 26 from 4-8pm for this event being organized by the Boston Public Market Association (BPMA).  This is a celebration around local food,  so we’re supplying the ice cream, Stillman’s Farm the pig and Sam Adams the beer.  We make the ice cream right there at the Brewery complex, so it couldn’t get more local.  Veronica and I will be wheeling it over and hanging out there ourselves, enjoying the event.

This is a fundraiser for the BPMA, which is an instrumental group working to bring a public market to Boston that will be a year round market for local foods. Tickets are $20 (adults) and $5 for kids (age 7-20) and those 7 yrs old and under are free – check out the BPMA’s Facebook Page for more details.

Do you read Edible Boston? We sure do!  It’s packed with all sorts of stories and information about local foods in the Boston area. Ilene, the editor, and her crew are truly the defacto source for all things local in the Boston area, providing a magazine that you’ll want to read cover to cover.  You can pick up a copy in shops like City Feed or in cafes like Flour – click here for a full list of locations where you can get a copy.  The magazine is partly responsible for how we came up with the idea to launch batch.  So it also has a special place in our heart!  Their summer issue just came out, and in it, is our first print ad.  Let us know if you read Edible Boston and which articles you’ve enjoyed, as well as what do you think of our ad?

There are many great pairings in the world.  Take for instance the celery stick in the bloody mary, a glass of red wine with some stilton cheese, or freshly tapped maple syrup with pancakes.  So we started thinking about what might be a tasty pairing with batch?  We thought, and we thought and then came up with chocolate.  Not just any chocolate, but artisanal chocolate made by a company that values its product and quality as much as we do.

After much planning and then waiting, we finally have 2 more machines that will help us to be able to produce more ice cream. One of the machines helps to mix up all the ingredients, while the other one is a super powered freezer (aka blast freezer in the ice cream industry) that works to quickly drop the temperature of the ice cream as soon as it comes out of the ice cream maker.  With these 2 new machines, we can make a lot more ice cream.  Especially salted caramel!

All the details would be boring, but here’s some of what we have had to do to get to this point.  Get a 600 lb machine off a wooden pallet to which it was bolted.  Every time we have received a machine on one of these wooden pallets, I have always scratched my head and wondered how other people solve this when not having a pallet jack.  Most people probably call movers. We just hunker down, let Veronica utilize her engineering brain, and then do some praying that no fingers or toes or feet for that matter will get injured.  Ultimately this involved using a make-shift ramp, a big metal wrench used like a hammer, and some serious whacking and balancing acts.

Next up was to make room for one of our machines by moving an 850 lb mixer machine (not ours) across the kitchen to a new spot.  More muscle power.  And praying….

So with new equipment comes new electrical needs.  This being our fourth and fifth machine, I’m becoming more knowledgeable in what’s involved with this electrical stuff.  When we got our first machine last year, I was amazed when it showed up without a cord.  That was par for the course apparently though as you can’t just plug one of these things into the wall like a toaster.  No, these things take some serious power and need special cords and receptacles (those things in the wall that you’re not supposed to put your fingers into), as well as 3 Phase power and xxx number of amps.  Blah, blah, blah.  See how much knowledge we’ve gained?  (Maybe Veronica already knew all these, but I certainly did not).

Anyway, for the past 3 days, the focus has been on having an electrician install all the electrical lines.  Those guys like to work early.  Like 7am.  So it’s been a lot of early mornings for us this week.

With just a few more small details to do around one of the machines, we are basically done and ready to make gobs and gobs of ice cream.  Bring on summer!

Factory Image Credit: leiris202