Artisan Ice Cream

November 7, 2013

Donut with Maple Caramel

We’re no strangers to donuts in our ice cream, which has us always looking for better varieties and shops around town. This week, thanks to our friend Heidi, we found a new shop. Well, new to us at least, although it’s been around since 2008 – SugaRush. Keoni Nguyen, owner of SugaRush, along with his son, are making some of the best classic donuts around, such as the bear claw, long johns, and bismarcks. His dough is nothing but perfection, being sweet, tender and yeasty, while maintaining a light airiness about it. These donuts are destined for our ice cream. And so the pursuit began to deconstruct one of my favorite classics: the maple long john. This week we’re calling it our Donut with Maple Caramel. Shall we?

This is one of SugaRush’s glazed raised donuts. Dear lord these are amazing. They aren’t reinventing the wheel here, but they are making an exceptional dough, which leads to an exceptional donut. You must go try one for yourself. The raised donut is the building block for the maple long john, so for the ice cream, this is our starting point. In order for the donuts to hold up in the ice cream, I decided to make croutons out of these glazers. They’re diced and then baked in the oven until crunchy. The croutons go into the ice cream at the end of the churn.

Next, the “maple glaze”. I made the decision to go with a maple caramel for the glaze portion, because I thought a traditional glaze would disappear in the ice cream. First, our sugar is caramelized, at which time cream is added followed by our maple syrup. The maple syrup thins out the caramel nicely while adding natualy maple flavor to the caramel. The caramel gets layered into the pints during packaging.

Donut with Maple Caramel. Consider this a better variety – a play on the classic maple long john.

Want to try it? 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 randomly on Friday 11/8/13 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback. Pints must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

October 24, 2013

Charred Cauliflower

This week we set out on a flavor quest that needed to become a reality. We’ve said it before, but it’s hard to find an ingredient that doesn’t marry well in ice cream, and we can safely say that has been the case with all of our vegetable experimentations. Cauliflower is one that we haven’t played around with too much, and I just couldn’t get this idea out of my head to char cauliflower over a wood fire. I mean, just to eat that sounded good to me, but putting it in ice cream? Yeah, that had to work. Let’s find out…

It always starts with having wonderful ingredients and this head of cauliflower from Gardens of Eagan couldn’t be any more wonderful. It’s still warm from being on the truck coming from the farm. Look at it! It’s perfect! To get the process started, I lit up a batch of oak charcol in a silo type charcoal started. After preparing the coals, I threw a grill grate right over the top of the silo and began charring the cauliflower on all sides. By charring, my hope was to bring out some natural sweetness and nutiness from the caramelization. It worked!

After the charring, the cauliflower gets pureed with cream and then cooked in our organic sugar cane ice cream base. After cooking and steeping, the cauliflower gets strained through a fine mesh sieve. The ice cream base is salted and cooled before it’s ready for the churn.

It’s ready and it’s a reality! This weeks flavor: Charred Cauliflower – ice cream infused with wood fired cauliflower. It’s creamy, nutty, and earthy, and it’s ready for your mouth.

Want to try it? 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 randomly on Friday 10/25/13 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback. Pints must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

October 10, 2013

Buttermilk Biscuit with Ground Cherry Jam

For those of you who actually read our flavor explorations and how we go about our processes, you likely know that we coin a good ol’ frozbroz flavor brainstorming session as a “flavor storm”. During one of these recent flavor storming sessions, the topic of buttermilk buscuits came up. It came naturally, as we love playing around with breads, doughs, and of course, extra dairy in our ice cream. So with buttermilk buscuits on the brain, the beginning of a flavor was born. To top it off, we just recenetly broke down a batch of ground cherry jam with fresh ground cherries from the magnificant Bossy Acers. First of all, who doesn’t like buscuits and jam? It turned into a no brainer. I mean, ground cherry jam in ice cream pretty much makes for an automatic 5 stars, but add in the buttermilk buscuits – now we’re elevating this concept to an off the charts scenrio. Let’s get it started with this week’s flavor: Buttermilk Buscuit with Ground Cherry Jam.

We’ve never actually made buttermilk buscuits before, and I am sure that we have a lot to learn, but for first-timers, these buscuits couldn’t have turned out any better for our purposes. After doing a little recipe research, it seemed the proven method was to use a food processor for the job. We found out that the key to great buttermilk buscuits is agitating the dough as little as possible, and the processor allows for that by doing the mixing with just a few pulses. And that’s just what we did…first, pulsing the butter, flour, leveners, and salt. Next, pulsing in our organic buttermilk from Kalona, IA. Then, it’s a gentle pat down of the dough before cutting and baking off in the oven on a sheet pan. That’s it! Buttermilk buscuits! But actually, that’s not it. We’re not done with them yet.

We can’t just throw buscuits into our ice cream. We could, but that’s just not our style. We talk a lot about textures in our ice cream, and although the concept of soft buscuits has potential to be texturally pleasing, we made the decision to make the buscuits crunchy to add contrast. To do this, we cut our buscuits into croutons, toss with a little butter, and into the oven to become condensed, salty, buttermilk buscuit crunchers. Trust us, it was worth the extra effort. These crunchers are tossed in to our organic cane sugar base at the end of the churn.

And then…these! Beautiful fresh ground cherries from our local farmers, Bossy Acres. We’ve said it before, and we will most certainly say it again – it is of uttmost impotantance for all of us to support our local farmers. I’m not sure I could explain it any better than the ladies at Bossy Acres, so click HERE for a great explanation of what supporting local means for all of us – our community. Back to the ice cream…Ground Cherries! After the very laborious task of peeling off the outer wrapper of the ground cherries, we mash them, and cook them down with a bit of sugar until we have our jam – liquid gold. The ground cherry jam is layered into the pints during packagaing.

The result is our rich creamy ice cream packed with crunchy salted buttermilk buscuit croutons all layered with Minnesota-grown ground cherry jam. It’s just another flavor storm concept that’s been elevated to an off the charts scenerio.

Want to try it? 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 randomly on Friday 10/11/13 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback. Pints must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

October 3, 2013

Red Hot Candied Apple

Its apple season, and as we rifle through our apple recipe list it becomes a bigger challenge every year to create new apple flavors. Especially considering we love love love some of our old ones. This year it was time to tackle the candied apple.

The classic cinnamon candy flavor on a candied apple – one you might also know from red hots candy or sticks of gum is Ceylon cinnamon, which is not the cinnamon most of us are used to eating in baked goods and desserts. That would be Cassia. Some call Ceylon “true cinnamon” even though its probably usurped by Cassia in usage. It’s easy to confuse the two, but their flavors could not be more different. In order to make sure this flavor accurately and truly represents that cinnamon candy flavor, we utilized Ceylon in several forms. You cannot discern the two by looking at them, but I’m going to include a picture of Ceylon cinnamon anyway. 🙂

First, the apples. We chose these beauties from Hoch orchard, diced them up, tossed them with brown sugar, butter and powdered Ceylon, and roasted them in the oven to concentrate their flavor and squeeze out the water (as we do). Then they were tossed with a little cane sugar at the end to provide a slight crunch. Parents, if you are looking for a healthy, and easy snack/almost candy/dessert for your kids (or yourself) – just these roasted apples will do the trick. But I digress, back to making ice cream.

Next, the syrup. We made our basic cinnamon syrup, but using Ceylon cinnamon instead of Cassia. For fun and for some color, I dissolved some red hots into the mix. You know, to make it legit.

The cream is made with our regular cane sugar base and infused with more ceylon cinnamon powder. The roasted apples are tossed in at the end of the churn, and the syrup is layered in as the ice cream is packed into the pint. The result is an ice cream laced with levels of ceylon cinnamon invoking that “red hot” flavor, and tart roasty chunks of apple speckled throughout each bite.

There you have it – Red Hot Candied Apple alongside our red hot new labels!

Want to try it? 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 randomly on Friday 10/4/13 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback. Pints must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

September 26, 2013

Sweet Corn Chevre with Candied Bacon

We’re still holding on to summer, and making the decision to roll out another sweet corn flavor is making it easy. So easy, that as soon as I mentioned the idea to my wife, she said, why don’t you make a sweet corn ice cream with candied bacon; you could even throw in some Singing Hills chevre too, if you wanted? Hell yes! That’s exactly what I wanted to do! – Sweet Corn Chevre with Candied Bacon. Come on now, this is how we do it…

First things first – finding great sweet corn, and that means finding a farmer who takes pride in harvesting at the perfect time to ensure peak sweetness. One thing is for sure, you know great sweet corn when you have it. And since it’s only here for a limited time each year, it’s hard to differentiate between all of the great sweet corn growers out there. Us broz are rather partial to the sweet corn from Peter’s Pumkins at the Midtown Farmer’s Market. After husking the corn, we cut it off the cob and throw it into a blender with cream. The idea is to get as much raw sweet corn flavor into our ice cream base as possible.

Next, we take our raw pureed corn cream and make our regular ice cream base with organic cane sugar. We then add chevre to the mix…Singing Hills Dairy chevre. If you haven’t had Singing Hills Dairy cheese, you need to, so go to Mill City or Fulton Farmers Market this Saturday and eat it. Ok, back to it…we then heat our corny ice cream base with chevre and strain it through a fine mesh strainer. The sweet corn chevre base is ready to be churned. But not before bacon time!

For the candied bacon, we start with Lorentz bacon from Canon Falls, MN. We rub down the bacon with brown sugar and bake it in the oven until crispy and candied. The bacon is then chopped up and added into the sweet corn chevre base at the end of the churn.

Summer is still here folks, and so is with rich sweet corn infused ice cream with creamy chevre and crunchy candied bacon. It’s that easy.

Want to try it? 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 randomly on Friday 9/27/13 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback. Pints must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!