Beside meeting Chris, I met with Zack Bruell last Saturday to talk ice creams and sorbets for his new downtown restaurant, Cowell and Hubbard. Zack’s a legendary Cleveland culinary authority whom I’ve enjoyed working with and learning from for years.

Last week I was also busy in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on a slew of new flavors. Every day I popped out of bed early with my head full of ideas and stayed in the kitchen late to see if I could make them soar. Not all did, but I’m eager to share a few with you all soon.

It might just be me, but I feel like I’m getting better at my craft all the time. My standards for creaminess, quality of flavor, and purity of ingredients go ever higher. Hopefully this is borne out by the tweaks I’ve made to our older flavors and by the new flavors you’ll be seeing.

Now it’s your turn—please take a minute or two to share a thought with us on our Facebook page facebook.com/Mitchells.Homemade.Ice.Cream!

Mike

– heating and cooling of the highest efficiency
– insta-hot tankless water heaters
– copious amounts of high performance insulation
– all LED and compact fluorescent lighting and signage
– furniture made in nearby Maumee, Ohio, freezers made in Oak Harbor, Ohio, and mixers made in Troy, Ohio
– energy efficient skylights and windows

Sourcing our ingredients from local family farmers is green, too—and healthful—and delicious!  Less fuel is used in transport, and knowing our farmers means using ingredients from people who care about us and don’t treat food production as an industrial job. Cows that are grass-fed and naturally raised produce milk which is not only more healthful and better tasting, but which avoids the use of large quantities of hydrocarbon-derived fertilizers that are required to grow feed corn.

Look in our shops in 2012 for more flavors made with ingredients from local partners, and we’ll offer additional test flavors in our Ohio City kitchen shop that we promise will be both interesting and delicious. If you ever have a flavor idea that you’re sure would be great, please share it with us!

We appreciate that every time you buy Mitchell’s, you’re supporting local food also. Thank you! Happy 2012, fellow Cleveland ice cream lovers!

Mike

It’s going to be a big day for small business. Be sure you’ve registered your AMEX card at http://www.facebook.com/SmallBusinessSaturday.

Another zero-waste partnership with our old friends at Great Lakes Brewing Co. Whenever they bottle a run of beer, there are a couple gallons or so of beer at the end that are a bit too foamy to fill into bottles. So instead of just wasting it, they empty it into our re-usable four-gallon containers that we pick up and make into Christmas Ale Gingersnap ice cream. So in addition to using milk drawn from grass-fed cows by our local dairy farmers, we’re also using beer drawn from the vats of our local beer-brewing friends! We’ve been doing this with their Edmund Fitzgerald Porter for maybe eight years, which many people have enjoyed at the Great Lakes brewpub as our Porter Chocolate Chunk ice cream.

For Christmas Ale Gingersnap, we start with the beer, then we infuse our grass-fed fresh cream with fresh organic ginger, Vietnamese cinnamon (the best in the world), a touch of local honey, and then we mix in our homemade gingersnaps. It’s got all the flavors of fall and the holidays, and although it’s definitely dessert-like, you’ll taste the delicious flavor of GLBC Christmas Ale with each bite. This is one fun flavor.

Over the course of the year we intend to offer other flavors at Mitchell’s that are made with residual Great Lakes beers.  There are quite a few delicious possibilities; and we’re even more excited about this prospect with our upcoming close proximity to the brewery, with the spring 2012 opening of our new ice cream kitchen and shop in Ohio City.  If you have any Great Lakes beer-inspired flavor suggestions, please share them with us! (Or if you have any flavor suggestions at all, please share those too.)

We hope you’ll join us in raising our scoopers and spoons to this one. Cheers!

Pete and Mike

We’re hard at work on our new kitchen and shop, on West 25^th just a skip north of the West Side Market. We couldn’t be more excited.

The building we’re transforming has been vacant since the headline-making Moda nightclub was shuttered in 2007; but lesser known is that it was originally the Rialto Theater when it was built almost 100 years ago. It was then a handsome building both inside and out, with a terra-cotta façade adorned with fluted columns and Corinthian capitals, an attractive wood and glass storefront, and a graceful marquee. Inside the main space, a thirty-foot ceiling was supported by enormous lattice-patterned wood trusses.

With the historic restoration that we have underway, we’re bringing the building back to its original grandeur and giving it a public and open use for all of Cleveland’s families and visitors to enjoy. We hope that in addition to serving the neighborhood residents, we’ll attract even those suburban Northeast-Ohioans who have a Mitchell’s shop closer to home. We’ll offer interesting test flavors that are available only there, and we’ll have the hand-making of our ice creams on full display in our kitchen. Visitors can watch and hear and smell as we wash and prepare our fresh fruits and herbs, bake our crusts and cakes, cook our sauces, and hand-craft our local, grass-fed dairy into all of the flavors on our menu. Have a party in one of our reserve-able spaces, bring a school group, or stop in after the game or concert for a perfect way to end an evening out. We’ll have outdoor patio seating in the warm months, with a view of the city from across the flats on one side of the building, and tables on West 25^th on the other side.

We’re not the first Mitchells to set up shop in this neighborhood. Beginning in the 1930s, our grandfather was a photographer at his brother’s photography studio (called Mitchell Studios) around the corner on Lorain Avenue and West 41^st. And we warmly remember shopping at the West Side Market with our mother when we were kids. We’ve always loved our city, and this is one of Cleveland’s most special neighborhoods.  So for us, this will be a personally rewarding and joyful event when we open in spring 2012. We’re looking forward to many years of ice cream-making fun!

CLEVELAND, Ohio — A homegrown ice cream company plans to move its headquarters to Cleveland, transforming a former nightclub building into a commercial kitchen and shop.

Mitchell’s Ice Cream inked a purchase agreement Tuesday to buy the former Moda building in Ohio City. With an expanding lineup of shops and sales to restaurants and grocery stores, the company has outgrown its kitchen in Rocky River.

Read more from the Plain Dealer article here…

They were having their annual herb fair (it was a blast!), with this year’s chosen theme being the Caribbean. One of the flavors we made for Karen and Mark was Coconut Lime Cardamom. I liked it, ate a lot of it, and am probably going to make it for our shops. It’s got three layers of flavor that unfold in succession: Tart key lime juice at first, creamy coconut milk, then cardamom that develops about a second after. It’s fun to savor even just a spoonful, so if you see it on our menu, at least ask for a sample!

The other flavor we made for the herb fair was Spiced Rum Cake. The ice cream was flavored predominantly with allspice, with cinnamon and ginger in the background and a splash of dark rum. We added pieces of our homemade spongy-cake that we soaked with similarly spiced dark rum syrup. We made it for Karen to suit her Caribbean theme, but I’m thinking we’ll wait until the air gives an autumn chill to put it on the menu in our shops.

There are many more new flavors swirling around in my head and in our kitchen—more later about those. Lest I give short shrift to our all-the-time flavors, when’s the last time you tried Butter Pecan? It’s one of my personal favorites that I can’t stop eating lately. We make ours with our homemade butterscotch blended with our salted pecan butter, and buttered pecan halves roasted by our friends at Hillson Nuts on West 71^st, just off of Clark Avenue. There’s a simple reason why everyone’s made Butter Pecan for decades—it’s downright delicious.

More news and musings from our kitchen coming in about week…

How does Crème Fraiche Apricot sound? The ice cream is mildly flavored with crème fraiche (a French version of sour cream), and we’re making an intense, tangy apricot preserve that we’ll hand-ribbon through the ice cream. I can’t keep from eating the test versions we’ve made, and our Kitchen Chief, Marty, and his pregnant wife (pregnant women make the ice cream-world go ‘round!) are clamoring for it to get done and become available. So tomorrow Marty and I will be training two of our ice cream makers, John and Chris, to make the preseves, then we’ll cool them overnight and get it on the menu a couple days later.

Another one in the flavor incubator: Almond Biscotti. It’s sweet almond ice cream flavored with pure almond oil, our homemade almond butter, and a touch of sea salt; and we’ll mix in pieces of our homemade biscotti, perhaps with a Belgian dark chocolate coating. I’ve been wanting to make an almond flavored ice cream for a long time, especially after having tasted one at the excellent Bi Rite Creamery on a trip to San Francisco earlier this year. I’ll be training one of our bakers, Sarah, to make the biscotti next week, so look for that one soon.

More news and musings from our kitchen coming in about week…

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As far back as we can remember, ice cream has been a constant source of happiness to our family. And Cleveland has always been our home. So in 1999 we made crafting top-notch ice creams and serving them to the Cleveland community our life’s work. Today we are as passionate as ever about making our ice creams as delicious and wholesome as they can be, and to being at least a small part of the reason Clevelanders love to call this place home. Thanks for visiting us!