Erik – Page 8 – FROZBROZ

July 14, 2014

Honey Churro with Cajeta

This week we’re throwing y’all a curve ball. The fruits are coming, but we’re taking a little hiatus while the berries ripen a bit more. Instead of local produce in our ice cream, this week we’re going to feature a few other wonderful local products to the Minneapolis area with our Honey Churro with Cajeta. Check it out…

Originally I was going to simply pair up a honey ice cream base with a cajeta caramel, but as I kept thinking about it, churros popped into my head…churro infusion! That’s it! These churros are from Marissa’s Bakery on the corner of 28th St and Nicolett Ave in South Minneapolis. Marissa’s has the mother load of all salty and sweet breads and pastries ascended from Mexico. The fried churros are perfectly crunchy, yet tender and sweet. We chop them up and toss them into our ice cream base to steep. After the steep, the churros are strained out and we add a little Beez Kneez Honey to sweeten it up. The Beez Kneez is a Minneapolis company on a mission to produce healthy hives, educate people about bees, and also deliver their honey to willing buyers. Check them out, if you haven’t heard of them already.

Now that our honey churro base is ready to spin, we start making the cajeta. Cajeta is a caramel made with goat milk and a touch of cinnamon. This week we’re using Poplar Hill goat milk from Scandia, MN. The milk, sugar and a cinnamon stick are simmered down for a few hours until a golden caramel has formed. The cinnamon stick is strained out, and the cajeta is cooled. The cajeta has a beautiful silky texture and subtle, yet recognizable, flavor of goat milk. The cajeta is layered into the pints during packaging.

This week’s curve ball – Honey Churro with Cajeta. Available to our Full Share CSI members as part of their July share.

If you’re not a Full Share memeber, you can be one of two lucky winners of 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. Two winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 7/18/14 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally. Prizes must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

July 1, 2014

Strawberry Lemonade

Guys, girls, ladies, gentlemen, brothers, sisters – it is Strawberry season!! Seriously, this where the summer harvest kicks off, and there’s really no better way to do it than with a fresh strawberries and ice cream. With a twist, perhaps? After throwing down our Pina Colada flavor last week, beverage ice cream has been steadily on my mind. Soooo, I thought it might be kind of refreshing to throw a classic combo together and make a Strawberry Lemonade ice cream. And that’s just what I did. Check it out…

Strawberries! I’m pretty pumped to say the least. These are from Pine Tree Apple Orchard located in White Bear Lake, MN. They taste as good as they look, believe me. To get them into our ice cream, we clean them, mash them in a pot, simmer them down with a bit of sugar, and there you have it…strawberry jammin. The jam is swirled into the ice cream after the churn.

For the lemonade ice cream, we’re using some very nice looking organic lemons. They’re not native to Minnesota, but they sure do make a refreshing glass of lemonade on a hot summer day. My idea was to essentially make a lemonade concentrate to flavor the ice cream base. To do this, I made a highly concentrate lemon syrup. The lemons are juiced and simmered with organic cane sugar until the desired consistency is achieved. Instead of adding sugar to the ice cream base to sweeten, I used to the full concentration of the lemon syrup. The lemon ice cream base is cooked, cooled, and is ready to churn with the addition of the strawberry swirl at the end.

Strawberry season has arrived with a refreshingly creamy twist of lemon for this week’s flavor – Strawberry Lemonade

Like to try some? You can be one of two lucky winners of 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. Two winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 7/4/14 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally. Prizes must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

June 30, 2014October 30, 2023

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June 19, 2014

Yogurt Peony

Spring is drawing to a close, but our celebration continues as we try to utilize all that is available to us here in Minnesota to create new flavors on a weekly basis. This week we’re celebrating a flower that is probably recognizable to everyone that lives in Minnesota. It’s the peony! They are at the end of their bloom right now, and not only are they gorgeous, they’re extremely fragrant. We are going to try to extract the peony fragrance and put it in our ice cream, along with another little buddy, Greek yogurt, to enhance the experience. Let’s get started with this week’s flavor – Yogurt Peony.

To start with, I wanted to create an added richness to the texture of this week’s flavor, but I also wanted to see how the sour attributes of a cultured yogurt would pair with the floral tones of the peony. To do this, I added Greek yogurt to our organic cane sugar ice cream base. Here we have a peony in full bloom with a bud in the upper left that is about to bloom. Not to gross anyone out, but peonies are extremely sweet smelling, and for that very reason ants cover their dense flower buds, eat the nectar that they produce, and this allows the peony to open up and bloom.Don’t worry, there are no ants in the ice cream. I repeat, there are no ants in the ice cream.

Next, we want to try to extract as much of that sweet peony fragrance into our cream. The flower petals are removed, soaked in water, washed again, and spun dry in a salad spinner. We add the petals to our yogurt base, cook and steep, in hopes that we will achieve full floral flavor. The petals are strained out; the base is cooled. Ice cream goes through many changes in flavor over the course of its raw existence to being made and sitting in the freezer for a week or two. After cooking, steeping and cooling, the floral tones were barely hitting my palate on the back end of the finish.

Right after the ice cream was churned I got a nice yogurt flavor with a distinct floral finish that tasted just as the peony smells. After packaging and sitting in the freezer for a few days, the floral tones have again diminished. But, that is not the end…ice cream is a peculiar thing – it’s flavor will continue to change and develop over time. It is now up to fate to see where this one ends up.

Yogurt Peony – A rich taste of Spring and Summer. Want to know how this week’s flavor has aged?… You can be one of two lucky winners of 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. Two winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 6/20/14 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally. Prizes must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

June 5, 2014

Vanilla Rhubarb with Pecan Crumble

Naturally, we’re continuing down spring’s path of locally grown produce. And for those of you who visited our pint sale last weekend, you may be thinking that we’re walking backwards down that path, because this week’s flavor was actually for sale last week. Fortunately, for two lucky peeps, there are a few pints left. This week we’re featuring one of spring’s first harvests, rhubarb, with this week’s flavor, Vanilla Rhubarb with Pecan Crumble.

As in year’s past, the rhubarb that we use in our ice cream is actually an heirloom variety that was passed down to me from my father-in-law. My father-in-law got his split from his parents’ old farm near Milwaukee, Wisconsin years ago. You might say, rhubarb is rhubarb, but in my opinion, it tastes better knowing where it came from. To make our vanilla rhubarb base, we first add a little Madagascar vanilla to our standard cane sugar base. We then make a rhubarb jam, first by chopping up our rhubarb, and then cooking it down in a pot with lemon juice, lemon zest and cane sugar. The fibers of the rhubarb break down and form a beautiful jam, which we swirl into our vanilla base before packaging.

We decided we wanted a little crunch time in this one, and pecans and graham crackers came to mind, so we decide to make a shortbread style crust. The pecans and graham crackers get pulsed in the food processor with flour, brown sugar and salt. The dough is pressed out on a sheet pan and baked until crusty. The crust chunkers are broken up and crumbled into the ice cream at the end of the churn.

It’s an irresistibly smooth vanilla ice cream swirled with Minnesota grown rhubarb jam, all studded with crunchy crumbles of pecan graham cracker crust. It’s the next stop on spring’s path.

Like to try some? You can be one of two lucky winners of 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. Two winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 6/6/14 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally. Prizes must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!