Here in Minnesota the leaves are starting to fall off the trees, which means that soon the dreaded raking begins. And thanks to our friends at the Minnesota Peach farm in Cold Spring, MN, so does the arduous process of preparing black walnuts for peoples mouths. You thought raking sucked? Try prepping a black walnut for baking and eating. There’s just five easy steps: harvest, hulling, curing, cracking and storage. So easy in fact, that all have their sensitivities and can easily be botched along the way. So why, you might ask, would anyone go through the trouble of harvesting black walnuts? Because black walnuts have this crazy robust flavor that is unlike anything else. It’s what we like to call “unique”. And that’s why we decided to make this weeks flavor: Black Walnut. Let’s get started!
These are processed Black Walnuts from Minnesota Peach. Seriously, if you’ve never had a black walnut before, they have a flavor like no other. They have a rich, buttery earthiness that could be likened to a mushroom, although there is also a blueberry muffin-esk note that complicates the initial flavor blast on your palate. It’s a wild and crazy ride people.
And let us point out, you can’t just run out to your local grocer and purchase these things. These nuts are locally hand harvested and processed.
Getting back to the ice cream…we wanted to make a creamy ice cream that is infused with that unique black walnut flavor, and in the end, that is what we did. The walnuts get a nice roasty toasty in the oven, cooled, and then into the food processor.
The pulverized roasted black walnuts get added into our heated ice cream base for a steeping session. All those crazy nut oils and flavors become one with the ice cream base, and then the nut solids get strained out. Into the mixer and…
There you have it! FrozBroz Black Walnut infused ice cream! A little something Fall to take the edge off after raking those leaves. Locally crafted ice cream made with locally grown, harvested and processed ingredients.
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 on Friday 10/12 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback or else 🙂 . Good luck!
pick me!
I used to get a QUART of these beauties every year from my in-laws who did all the work, picking them from their trees. As I remember, it involved putting them in gunny sacks and driving over them to loosen the husks, and then many evenings in front of the fire cracking and picking. My word, what a memory. I can taste them right now!
I harvested some of these last year from our tree but man they’re. A tough nut to crack.