benny – Page 20

May 3, 2012

Fennel Pollen

Sometimes simple is best. Over the course of the last year we’ve explored ice creams that sometimes include up to 5 main flavors. Big flavors like these greatly open up the variety and combinations we can make, but can also overshadow the greatness of one of those ingredients on their own.

In this instance, it was extremely tempting to pair the Fennel pollen with almonds, or honey or pistachios, etc. But in the end, the flavor of this particular spice turned out to be so complex and so incredible in ice cream that it demanded the stage to itself, at least for its first foray into our flavor cache.

Fennel pollen is an expensive spice, not so much because of being hard to find, but because of how difficult it is to harvest. It’s gathered by shaking it off the buds of fennel flowers and can take quite a bit of time to collect just an ounce. It has a golden appearance, and kind of tastes like it.

We steeped the fennel pollen in the cream to fully extract as much flavor as possible. The batter was then churned immediately. It seemed almost too easy.

We expected a unique flavor, but nothing like this. Once paired with the cream and sugar base, the obvious flavors such as anise blossomed, but so did caramel and curry notes. It could pair extremely well with a lot of different desserts or dishes, but to appreciate the depth of the flavor it really needs to be eaten all by itself.

Gold.

If we ever imagined an ice cream flavor for royalty, this would be it. We’re very excited about the how it turned out, and have a feeling this will be a Froz flavor for a long time to come.

As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page or in the comments here to be entered into the drawing. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (5/4/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page (or email you if you’re comment resides here). Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else.

Good luck!

Would you like to see more of this kind of ice cream or be able to buy it online? Then please, help us with our fundraiser on indiegogo, we only have 8 days left and need all the help we can get! In exchange you’ll be one of the first to get our ice cream. Visit our page at www.indiegogo.com/frozbroz

April 19, 2012

Pink Peppercorn Rosemary with Candied Grilled Pineapple

This is a flavor solely inspired by our friend Mandy Rismon. Mandy, a fellow food nerd sent us a fantastic recipe she drummed up in her own kitchen, for a riesling poached pineapple w/ rosemary whipped cream and pink peppercorn garnish as an idea for a new flavor.

We loved it and since we have been wanting to rock some pineapple, chose to use her recipe for this weeks flavor. We had to make some minor changes to Mandy’s recipe to make all the elements work with ice cream, but the end result is a total win.

An exciting, but very important sidenote – this is our first week using cream from Pride of Main Street Dairy from Sauk Center, MN. We’re pretty pumped about how awesome it is.

Fresh organic pineapple, straight from Seward Co-op.

First, for the pineapple, we chose to grill it to get some of the water out, and add a little char to the mix.

Don’t worry, we took out the core.

Then, we candied it with a touch of maple syrup to impart a little extra sweetness and get that last bit of water out to ensure there would be no icy. Avoid the ice.

Candy indeed.

We steeped the rosemary to give it a nice background flavor in the cream

Do not disturb…

And to finish, we added some freshly cracked, fruity pink peppercorns straight into the cream during the churn.

Pretty aren’t they?

Last but not least, the pineapple was carefully layered into the pint, so as not to completely overwhelm the subtlety of the rosemary and pink peppercorn. We think it turned out spectacularly.

Here it is. Would you like to see more of this kind of ice cream or be able to buy it online? Then please, help us with our fundraiser on indiegogo, we only have 22 days left and need all the help we can get! And in exchange you’ll be one of the first to get our ice cream. Visit our page at www.indiegogo.com/frozbroz
As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (4/20/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page (or email you if you’re comment resides here). Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!

April 5, 2012

Brown Butter Cornbread

Among all of the flavors we’ve made, this remains among the top. We consider it to be one of our banner flavors, and tends to come up anytime we are asked what our favorites are. Since this full recipe has been featured in Metro magazine’s march issue (see the whole process and get the recipe here), I’m not going to spend too much time reiterating it.

I will talk about McCann farm eggs which came our way through our friend Heidi Skoog (of Bastian+Skoog and Serious Jam). These beautiful eggs (which look like they’ve already been colored for Easter) exemplify the reasons why we love working with local farmers and why we think natural and responsible farming is the only way.

The eggs have great flavor, great texture and their color are perfect representations of the importance of raising animals to be happy. All of our ice cream includes eggs, and we were thrilled to have these for this batch.

The ice cream flavor itself was inspired through a southern kick I was on, stemming both from eating experiences I enjoyed with my in-laws in the blue hills of Virginia, as well as some of the great southern cooks like Frank Stitt that I stumbled upon during my obsession with southern cooking. Cornbread is a staple of the south, and I originally made it to pair with smoked pork butt. Turns out, it pairs well with absolutely anything, as cornbread is wont to do.

These crunchy cornbread croutons turn candy-like when suspended in the cream, and sing when accompanied by a little (or maybe a lot) of brown butter. We tend to develop flavors to be very forward, very “in-your-face” and this was one of the first that blazed the trail.

And in this case, as with all of our ice cream, its made with eggs from happy chickens, cream and butter from happy cows, and wait, did we mention happy farmers? All part of the equation.

This flavor is one of a handful that we are offering in the perks on our Indiegogo campaign. It will certainly be one of our mainstay flavors as we begin production. Help us out with a contribution and you be one of the first to ever have it. Or, be a lucky winner in this weeks giveaway and try it that way. Or better yet – BOTH! Please help us keep traffic going to the Indiegogo page- having our fans help us keep the visits to the page helps keep us as a featured project on Indiegogo, which will help us meet our funding goal.

RIGHT HERE! BROWN BUTTER CORNBREAD ICE CREAM!

As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (4/6/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page (or email you if you’re comment resides here). Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck! Also – again, please don’t forget about our Indiegogo fundraising – we’ve at the halfway pointdays and need all the help we can get! http://www.indiegogo.com/frozbroz?a=446076

March 22, 2012

Sour Cream Vanilla Bean with Dark Chocolate Cake and Ganache Ribbon

We’ve been talking amongst ourselves over the past couple of months about wanting to collaborate more with some of our friends and fans on creating new flavors. The first collaboration with our friend Heidi Skoog and her Serious Jam was fantastic. We just completed our first fan flavor contest which we’ll be releasing next week, but we’ve also been lucky enough to have more of our compadres in town agree to throw their uber-talent into the mix (no pun intended). And the first of that crew: Sheela Namakkal, the local cupcake genius affectionately known to us as vice president of everything. If you stop down to the beautiful Mitre Box Framing Studio on Saturday mornings for “Cupcake Saturdays” (and we HIGHLY recommend you do) you’ll know why. She rules and her cupcakes rule more.

I have been wanting to do a vanilla bean ice cream with chocolate cake for a long time, and when I finally got around to it, Sheela was the first person I called. And as I expected, I was the one scrambling to figure out how to make the ice cream as good as the ingredients she produced to go in it.

Sheela rocked out some amazing dark chocolate cupcakes. These babies are as hand crafted as it gets and completed with 100% ScharffenBerger cocoa powder. They are DENSE with chocolate.

Dreamy.

To pair, she dreamed up some bitterwseet ganache, with a touch of irish cream and more 100% cocoa.

So much chocolate. So much.

So, it was my job to take this little stash that I so luckily procured, and turn it into ice cream.

First, as you’ve seen us do before, I disassembled the cupcakes into croutons, which were doused in brown butter, a little salt, and baked in the oven until they were crunchy enough to stand up in the cream.

These are far too snackable.

With the cake ready for it’s cream bath, it was time to address the cream itself.

We’ve used many variations of vanilla over the past years, but nothing beats the bean.

To pair with the vanilla, we used our sour cream base to give the typical vanilla flavor a little more depth and tang.

Westby’s is a cooperative creamery in Westby, Wisconsin and have been operating for over 100 years. It has a great flavor and texture, and incorporates seamlessly into our ice cream base. All sour creams are not equal.

The sour cream and vanilla seeds were mixed into the cream, tossed with the dark chocolate cake croutons and layered into the pints with the bittersweet ganache.

The dimensions of deep chocolate, hints of brown butter and salt, acidity from the sour cream and bright vanilla flavor are right in your face. And as Sheela would say, they are also “for your face”.

Want to try it for yourself?

As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (3/23/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page (or email you if you’re comment resides here). Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck! Also – don’t forget about our Indiegogo fundraising – we’ve got 50 days to go and need all the help we can get! http://www.indiegogo.com/frozbroz?a=446076

March 8, 2012

Basil with Meyer Lemon Curd

In all of the chaos of kicking off our IndieGoGo fundraiser this week, we arrive at our favorite day. Or as it has become over the last year – flavor day.

And as luck would have it, the flavor I chose for the week of the kickoff proved to be a bit of a challenge.

We had been wanting to use Meyer lemons in a flavor since they are in season and a facebook flavor-storming session with our good friend Molly McNeil (of Minnesota Peach fame) pushed it into the spotlig

I envisioned this flavor to be a green hued, deeply flavored sweet basil ice cream with ribbons of meyer lemon curd glowing through each scoop. Unfortunately I realized after my first incarnation that we weren’t quite ready to cross into pesto cream sauce with lemon ice territory, which was exactly where we ended up after the first round.

Sometimes these flavors take on a personality during development, almost like they are a living, breathing thing. I’ve caught myself almost talking to a flavor idea, demanding that it cooperate or tell me what would make it happy. After some smooth talking, I finally found the right path, which included a few adjustments to find harmony.

First, the lemon curd.

Lemon curd is a great cake filling or baking ingredient, but thrown into ice cream in its basic form results in a hard, icy texture that doesn’t translate well. So to fix, the curd was baked in the oven to caramelize the sugars and reduce out the water content. The result is exactly the filling you get with a lemon bar, translucent with the melding of the sugar, butter, and eggs. It incorporates into the ice cream beautifully.

For the ice cream, I initially steeped the cream in basil and threw in minced basil to finish. The result was an overwhelming sour basil flavor, which if actually treated like pesto might be good, but without the balance of a walnut or pine nut was too much on its own. I’m not going to say Pesto is not workable because in all honesty its danced around our flavor list for awhile. But for now, it would wait.

The right decision was keeping the basil out of the ice cream until right at the end, where it was minced and added to provide an accent flavor to the Meyer Lemon (which is truly the star of the show) and leave the clean cream flavor some room to breathe.

The final product.

Want to try some for yourself?

As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (3/9/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page (or email you if you’re comment resides here). Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!