NEW ICE BEAUTIES
There’s a new ice bar in town, just in time to face down the hot sticky days and nights of a New York August. Minus5 Ice Bar is the latest to jump into the freezing pool of drinking establishments that are all about ice. The bar is made of ice, as are the walls, stools tables, banquets, glasses, chandeliers, and just about everything else. Sure, it’s a gimmick. And Minus5 pushes it towards the touristy commercial extreme, but the ice is beautiful to see and the libations are beautiful to drink out of frozen chalices -- and being a chilled tourist for one hot night isn’t the worst thing in the world.
About 35,000 pounds of extra-clear ice blocks were used to build Minus5. Every few months, you’ll see brand new ice sculptures gracing the space, which is kept at an interior temperature of 23 degrees (-5 degrees Celsius... get it?). Borrow one of Minus5’s warm parkas so you can stand it while you sip yourself into a premium vodka brain-freeze.
You can find Minus5 in two more hot spots as well, Las Vegas and Monte Carlo.
ICEBAR, the first ice bar, opened in 1994 in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden at the ICEHOTEL, a brilliant concept hotel made of ice in the wilds of Sweden’s Lapland. This is ice as art and architecture, without the schtick. Check out “The Coolest Art,” our Daily Fix tomorrow, where we will feature ICEHOTEL’s latest icy designs and art exhibitions. ICEBAR by ICEHOTEL can also be found in Stockholm, London, and Oslo.
Photo: Theodore Gray
The Ice Cream Lab, in Beverly Hills, was founded by Joseph Lifschutz and Tommy Ngan as “a delicious experiment,” making ice cream to order. This isn’t just a “tell-us-what-crazy-combo-you-want-us-to-mix-in” kind of ice cream shop. This is a “we-can-make-ice-cream-from-scratch-right-in-front-of-your-nose” emporium. Ice Cream Lab is one of just a few in the world that uses a machine, stoked with liquid nitrogen, to instantly freeze whatever concoction you dream into ice cream.
Instant means fresh. And fresh means no need for chemical additives. The Lab uses only 100% organic fresh local ingredients. Two of our favorite flavors:
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Coffee Brittle: Fresh roasted Intelligentsia coffee, organic cream, homemade dark chocolate toffee brittle, and almonds.
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Salt Lick Crunch: Organic vanilla ice cream, pretzels, and caramel, topped with flaked sea salt.
Ice Cream Lab Edit Sequence 2 from LAIceCreamLab on Vimeo.
The Lab’s video is a treat to watch. Stay with it as you watch graffiti artist transform the bare-walled store into a graffiti pop art explosion and you’ll see the store come alive. You’ll see smoke rise from hyper-cold fluid gas as it hits the liquid custard base and.... poof! It’s ice cream!
The concept isn’t brand new, but it’s just now starting to take off, thanks, in part to the recent molecular cuisine trend. Sub Zero got a head start 10 years ago. It has 25 locations in nine states. They are gearing up to add a few hundred more stores, in Texas and Southern California. Sub Zero is big on mix-ins. They also let you choose among dairy, soy, full, and low fat bases. And they light up the nitrogen steam so you get a thrill watching your chill materialize.
It’s not just razzle dazzle magic show. The ice cream produced by these liquid nitrogen machines has a taste edge -- it’s creamier thanks to the lower freezing temperature and smaller ice crystals induced by the -320 degree gas. Smitten Ice Cream, a funky shop set in an old shipping container in San Francisco, patented their own version of the machine, named “Brrr,” which blasts out just a small selection of relatively simple, yet bracingly delicious flavors each week.
If you have a liquid nitrogen machine at home (and who doesn’t?) you might go all out and do your own instant ice cream bar. Boozy Fruity Chocolaty Affairs has some great ideas here.
Since you probably don’t have a liquid nitrogen ice-cream maker at home, we’d like to offer some no-machine-necessary beautiful ice-pop recipes for your chilling pleasure.
Popsicles
Photo: Emily Von Euw
Here’s a gorgeous recipe from Emily Von Euw, currently appearing on her blog, this rawesome vegan life.
Fruit popsicles with coconut milk: makes twelve
Ice cream:
400 ml fresh raw coconut milk (or 1 can of store-bought)
1/4 cup raw cane sugar (or preferred sweetener, to taste)
Other ingredients (use however much you need):
Frozen fruit
Finely chopped thyme, rosemary, basil or other fave herb (optional)
To prepare the popsicles: fill popsicle molds with small pieces of fruit and chopped herbs (don't forget the popsicle sticks!) leaving room for the ice cream to fill in.
To make the ice cream: blend the coconut milk and sweetener until smooth. Then carefully and slowly pour into your popsicle molds until they are full. Set in the freezer overnight or until frozen solid - then take them out and lick them clean in the warm sunshine.
If you can get some lovely handcrafted rootbeer, like Surf City Root Beer, called “Beauty in the form of root beer,” by the Gourmet Root Beer afficiandos, then you will love this new-fangled throwback to childhood, “Root Beer Float Popsicles.” This super-easy frozen treat, concocted by Bite This, as shared on Food52, will likely bring back warm memories as it ices down your summer-parched tongue. The recipe calls for vanilla yogurt, but we like the creamy decadence of straight out vanilla ice cream instead. And the original doesn’t include cherries, as it shows in the photo. But we sneaked some black pitted cherries into our popsicle molds and totally loved the extra magic it made. Check out the recipe here.
Of course, simply filling a mold with juicy jewels of fresh fruit and pouring a light clear liquid, like white grape juice or infused water over top, produces ice pops that just might be your perfect icy beauty for today.
Be sure to check out our other Beautiful Cool posts this week, including (Sun, Mon, Tues and ..... “The Coolest Art” (Thursday), Cool Events (Friday), and “A Beautiful Chill Out” (Saturday). And check out the flower-studded ice cubes in our post, “Making Water More Beautiful to Drink.”
