FrozBroz Craft Ice Cream – Page 11

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!

March 5, 2012

Update: IndieGoGo Fundraising – THANK YOU!!!

THANK YOU FOR YOUR LOVE AND SUPPORT!

Thank you to EVERYONE who supported our Indiegogo fundraising campaign. We are speechless! Thanks to you, we raised $13,274! We really can’t thank you enough. In the end we were unable to reach our goal of raising $35,000, but we are forging ahead with this adventure knowing that so many of you are behind us. We are now carefully weighing our options, and will do our best to keep all of you up to date in our next steps to getting our ice cream to everyone who wants it. Again, from the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU!

February 23, 2012

Chocolate-Peanut Butter with Medjool Dates and Pecans

Both of us “Broz” have relatives in Virginia and have spent time there enjoying various foods of the South. It certainly ranks high among our faves in regional cuisine, what with the smoke and fat and all.

Now, I’m not claiming that the origin of the peanut butter and walnut stuffed dates necessarily began in Virginia, but it seems logical to me, and was where I experienced them first – so I’m running with it.

I hated dates as a kid, but these indulgent handfuls of sugar quickly corrected my bad attitude. The idea of turning this into an ice cream flavor has lingered on our list for awhile, but when I recently picked up some Medjool dates from the co-op, it jumped right to the top.

To start: the peanut butter. Since we didn’t have a source for locally made peanut butter at our fingertips, we made it ourselves.

but first…..

Luckily, I happened to have some dark chocolate cream handy from making batch of our 3x Chocolate, and incorporated just enough into the peanut butter to darken the color and enhance the roasted flavor.

Peanut Butter, Froz style…

Then those precious Medjools….

The date that inspired this recipe is rolled in sugar once it’s been stuffed to give it an extra layer of crunch and added sweetness. For this incarnation, the gooey dates were diced first and then tossed around in granulated sugar to give that graininess some representation in the ice cream.

They sought each other out like velcro, so they had to be seperated and frozen before incorporating into the cream.

To finish, the base was blended with the chocolate peanut butter, and the pecans and dates were tossed in at the end.
Like to try some? 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 (2/24/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. 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!

February 16, 2012

Fennel with Candied Orange

We are in prime time citrus season right now, and you’d better take advantage of it if you haven’t already. Oranges are so ripe and mouth watering right now that we really wanted to feature a flavor that made the orange pop. We wanted to get a concentrated orange flavor into the ice cream naturally, and after much thought, we decided our best route would be to candy the rind.

One the other side of the spectrum, we needed a good pairing. We’ve been toiling over making a Fennel flavored base ever since we dropped our Almond Green Anise with Figs flavor last Fall. This seemed like the opportune time to showcase a fennel based ice cream paired with seasonal oranges.

Organic Navel Oranges and Fennel. Everyone knows oranges, but fennel is a mystery to a lot of people. It can be eaten raw or cooked. In its raw form, fennel has a sweetness with a subtle anise flavor. When cooked, the anise flavor becomes even more tenuous, to the point that if you are not a fan of anise flavor, you wouldn’t hardly know it was there. For this batch, we cook the fennel.

One of my favorite ways to prepare Fennel is to braised it in butter, stock and lemon juice. It then gets finished with a glaze of the braising liquid and grated Parmesan.

For the ice cream, we chopped up our Fennel bulb and toss it in our cream. We did a short braise, allowed the mixture to cool, and then strained out the Fennel chunkers.

The final product is a complex Fennel cream base that becomes the backbone to this flavor.

Next, we peel the rind off of the oranges, chop ’em, cover with water, bring to a boil, strain, and repeat a few more times. This process slowly reduces the bitterness of the rind. They then get simmered down with a simple syrup of sugar and water, then strained and tossed with sugar. In the end we are left with natural candied orange that we throw into the ice cream at the end of the churn.

This is it folks – Fennel with Candied Orange. The sweet fennel cream with a chewy orange punch is something you won’t find at another ice cream shop. You saw it here first.

Like to try some? 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 (2/17/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. 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!

February 9, 2012

Maple French Toast with Apricot

Sometimes the biggest treats are only that because of their timing.

As a kid, my mother’s call to dinner was always veiled in a bit of mystery. I rarely paid attention to what was being made, being much more consumed with horsing around with siblings and friends outside or earning the hard money on my after school paper route.

Hunger was a guarantee, and when presented the ever feared cabbage hotdish, a hunger that was guaranteed to linger. But once in awhile, when my mom had exhausted her pantry or simply needed to use something up, that pre-supper time famish was met with the greatest gift of all: breakfast.

Sometimes it was pancakes, others it was scrambled eggs and bacon – and if we hit the jackpot, it was french toast. It was a small victory that engraved itself in my head, and eating a plate of french toast now hearkens the joy of seeing that pile of egg bread on my dinner plate as a kid.

After earning my own french toast stripes with a picky eating three year old of my own, it was time to get this idea into some cream.

There’s something therapeutic about dredging bread in egg. Not sure what. Once everyone’s had their fill the rest (4-5 slices) of the french toast is diced up, baked off and transformed into crunchy little nuggets of breakfast goodness – ready to be bathed in fresh cream.

Ready….

For some added dimension we used these dried apricots from the Seward Co-Op, so sweet they could gag honey, minced into small pieces and tossed in as a dancing partner for our favorite breakfast bread.

Giant fruit candy.

To finish, the french toast croutons and minced apricots are tossed in to the base, and some of our friend maple syrup is added in right at the end to bring the flavor to fruition.

Wild Country Maple Syrup from Lutsen, MN.

Maple French Toast Apricot.

Like to try some? 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 (2/10/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. 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!