Design – FROZBROZ

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!

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!

September 6, 2013

Borage Buerre Blanc

Want to learn something new today? Ok. Have you ever heard of Borage? Maybe you have, but I hadn’t, until my friend Christine dropped us a line and asked if we wanted to use it in our ice cream. Borage is a freely seeding annual plant that is said to taste like cucumber. It is considered an herb, but it is usually grown as a flowering plant in vegetable gardens, as it attracts pollinating bees. Now that you learned something new, allow me to show you something else new…us making borage ice cream with white wine. It’s this week’s flavor: Borage Buerre Blanc. Let’s do this!

This is a picture of the borage plant, similar to the one growing in Christine’s garden. Both the flowers and leaves are edible, but this week, we’re using just the leaves. The borage leaves are meant to be used young, because as they mature, they get a prickly fuzz. This plant was mature, but that’s ok, because we’re steeping the leaves for flavor and straining out after heating. I wanted to try to infuse as much of the borage leaves’ cucumber flavor as possible into our organic cane sugar base.

To pair with the cucumber flavor, I was contemplating acidic flavors , like lemon, lime, vinegar, etc., but in the end decide to pair it with a French sauce called a Buerre Blanc, AKA white butter. A Buerre Blanc can be made with either vinegar or wine, and I opted for the wine approach. I want a light, dry white wine, that would go nicely with a cucumber salad, so I decided to go with this Pacific Rim Dry Reisling. Along with the wine, peppercorns and a bay leaf get reduced down until almost dry in the pan. A small amount of cream is added, and then butter to finish it off. The sauce is strained through fine mesh and ready to use. Buerre Blancs are rich and acidic and generally pair well with a light delicate fish. Today, we’re going to add it into our borage infused ice cream to give it a little tang.

Borage Buerre Blanc ice cream! It has a subtle earthy cumcumber flavor that is accompanied by a light acidic touch provided by the Buerre Blanc. Something new, but just another day for the FrozBroz.

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 9/13/13 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!

August 29, 2013

Peach with Peach Syrup

We’ve been on a bit of a vegetable ice cream kick lately, so we thought we would switch it up a little this week. It’s stone fruit season, and peaches at Weaver’s Country Store in Fall Creek, WI are ripe for the buying. We picked up a case and began pondering the possibilities. In the past, we’ve released a few other peach flavors on our blog including our Candied Peach Cobbler and Pistachio with Peach Marmalade. This week, we’re going purist, and set out to capture as much peach flavor as we could in a pint of our ice cream. Which brings us to this week’s flavor – Peach with Peach Syrup. This is how we do it…

Peaches! Michigan peaches from Weaver’s Country Store. First things first – we pit them and dice them up.

After meeting up with our good friend Heidi of Serious Jam, we had a discussion about how she keeps fruit from breaking down during the canning process. It so happens that Heidi’s techniques are quite suitable for ice cream making. For the peaches, she suggested we try a maceration process, involving soaking the peaches in sugar and lemon juice. The process pulls liquid out of the peaches, and all of the flavors between the peaches, lemon juice and peachy liquid in the bowl equilibrate. Beautiful! After the maceration, the peaches are strained and slow roasted in the oven until their flavors concentrate even more. Once cooled, the peaches are tossed into our plain organic sugar cane ice cream base at the end of the churn. But that is not all…we still have all of the reserved liquid left from straining the peaches after the maceration.

The liquid is placed in a sauce pan and reduced down to a syrup that will not turn icy in our ice cream once frozen. This golden peach syrup is layered into the pints during packaging.

Peachy Peachy! Smooth creamy peach syrup layered ice cream with chunkers of candied peaches. It’s FrozBroz pure peach goodness!

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 8/30/13 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!

August 15, 2013

Fennel Leaf

We’re knee deep in the bounty of summer’s harvest here in Minnesota, and considering that we only release one new flavor every week, it becomes difficult to decide what fruits or vegetables to utilize on a weekly basis with so many to choose from. And then sometimes, it just falls in your lap. Kind of like when your all time favorite farmers drop you a line asking if you might want to play around with some of their harvested wares. That’s just what happened. Two of the hardest working ladies in the business, AKA Bossy Acres, threw us a healthy dose of their fennel leaves. Seriously Bossy Acres, you two are the bomb digs for finding something new and exciting for us to work with. For those of you who have followed our journey here, you know that we’ve pretty much put the fennel plant through the ringer in our ice cream. A few years back we starting with our Almond Green Anise with Figs, then, our Fennel with Candied Orange, and finally, but until today, not last, our Fennel Pollen. This week, we set out to utilize the last portion of the fennel plant in our ice cream, so lets get started with this week’s flavor: Fennel Leaf.

Bossy Acres fennel leaves! On my way to pick them up, my mind was racing with flavor ideas and parings. Picking them up, the first thing I noticed was how fragrant they were. The leaves were emitting this amazing sweet licorice aroma. I knew immediately that I had to try using them on their own. It was now plain and clear what brought our Bossy sisters to wonder if these leaves were something we could do something with.

I wanted to try and get all of that sweet licorice flavor out of the leaves, so I tossed them in the blender with the cream and pureed. We then added the cream and pureed fennel leaves to our standard organic cane sugar ice cream base. This base was then cooked with the fennel leaves still in it and strained through a fine mesh seive. After a cool down, the fennel leaf base was ready for a churn.

The results: a beautiful fennel flavor that is earthy, almost grassy tasting with a subtle hint of sweet licorice. Surprising to us, it turned out much less licoricey then we had anticipated. This flavor would make for a fantastic first course. Cheers to Bossy Acres for making this week’s FrozBroz flavor decision 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 8/16/13 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!