FrozBroz Craft Ice Cream – Page 9

July 12, 2012

Deconstructed Blueberry Pie w/Charred Vanilla Bean

As a kid, my family would often spend a day of our summer vacation picking wild blueberries along a railroad track in northern Wisconsin, south of Hayward. We’d endure loads of mosquito bites and hoards of woodticks to earn a few gallon pails full of them, that would usually net a pie or two after we finished snacking. It was always one of my favorite pies, partially due to its rarity, but mostly because of the incredible sweetness and flavor combined with the dark blue hue of the macerated berries. I’ve mentioned these pie memories before – they are landmarks on my brain.

I hoped to get my hands on some of those very wild blueberries for this flavor, but I got the next best thing, which was these beauties from our recent fave Svihel farms from Foley, MN.

You might remember a few weeks ago when we released the Smoked Bourbon Vanilla Bean ice cream that we mentioned some discoveries while experimenting with vanilla beans on the grill. One of those discoveries was a charred version which we knew would give us a nice option so we preserved it for future use.

It paired wonderfully with the pie concept and made a nice dark fleck in the ice cream.

The blueberries were reduced with sugar, lemon, cinnamon and cardamom to create the “pie filling”.

Then there was the pie crust. Similar to the deconstructed pecan pie flavor we made last fall, the pie crust was baked off and broken up to go into the charred vanilla ice cream as an add in – floating throughout the pint.

The blueberry filling was layered into the pint to leave thick, ribbons of sticky blueberry jam.

It can be yours.. 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 (7/13/2012) 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 agree to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!

July 4, 2012

Orange with Raspberry Honey and Singing Hills Chevre

We are in full on berry season and this week it’s raspberries that are making their yearly ice cream debut. And since the berries are ripening fast, we need to get them while they’re hot and into the ice cream ASAPeronie. We’ve been talking to our friends down at Singing Hills Dairy about using some of their products in our ice cream and it seemed only fitting that this would be the week since chevre and raspberries make for a killer combo. Singing Hills Dairy, located in Nerstrand, MN, is a small 25 acre sustainable goat farm where Lynne Reeck and Kate Wall farm pasture raised goats. Lynne and Kate aren’t just goat farmers, they’re also cheesemakers, turning their high quality goat milk into a variety of plain and flavored chevres and fetas. Check them out, and please support them, Saturdays at the Mill City Farmers Market and Fulton Farmers Market and Sundays at the Kingfield Farmers Market. With that introduction, lets get to work on this week’s flavor: Orange with Raspberry Honey and Singing Hills Chevre.

We are lucky enough to have a few friends that sport quality raspberry patches right here in the city of Minneapolis. These beauties are sweet and plump and ready for your mouth.

As with most fruit and berries, we need to find a way to reduce or displace their moisture content. This week we decided to roast these raskelberries, condensing their flavors into pure raspberry tartness…raspberry bombs!

If you’re one to actually read our blog posts, you’ll know how much we love our Nordeast Nectars honey…liquid gold. We just featured them in last weeks flavor, Salt Bagel with Cream Cheese and Honey.

The Nordeast Nectars raw honey gets mixed together with our roasted raspberries and then layered into our pints during packaging.

Singing Hills Dairy plain Chevre! As we mentioned before, this is one of a few handfuls of artisanal goats milk cheeses they are making. Other chevres they offer include: Herbed, Garlic Pepper, Marinated, Honeyed, Cranberry Walnut, and Pesto Torte. This week we decided to use their plain, and wanted to try something that we’ve never tried before…

Using soft cheeses in the past, we’ve generally incorporated them into the ice cream base. We wanted to try and create pockets of cheese in the ice cream, so we start by scooping out small chunks of chevre onto a parchment lined sheet pan. Into the freezer so chunkersons would individually freeze. These frozen chunks get thrown into the ice cream at the end of the churn, and to our surprise they ended up staying relatively hard in the ice cream. They add a great texture contrast while offering the spectacularly clean tangy flavor of Singing Hills Chevre.

And lets not forget about our base flavor component: Orange! We add the zest of our oranges to our ice cream base which deepens the flavor pairing well with both the raspberries and the chevre.

Oh, it’s on! Berry season in full effect here at FrozBroz. You can see it all happening right here in our Orange with Raspberry Honey and Singing Hills Chevre.

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 (7/6/2012) 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!

June 28, 2012

Salt Bagel with Cream Cheese and Honey

Our friends at Nordeast Nectars are beginning to harvest honey again and we’re going to do our damndest to get this liquid gold into our ice cream as much as possible. I’ve been wanting to do a salt bagel and cream cheese flavor for awhile, and when our beekeeper friends announced it was honey time, it seemed like it should also be honey, salt bagel and cream cheese ice cream time.

Angelic? That’s one way to describe the flavor of Nordeast Nectars honey.

Thanks to a quick survey of our followers, we were pointed to St. Paul Bagelry in our search of a good salt bagel. Good indeed. These circles were crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside just like they should be, with salt on the top AND the bottom. Bingo.

Salty.

We sliced and diced them, added a little butter and baked them a bit more to help them hold up in the ice cream.

Oh, and let’s not forget the cream cheese.

The cream cheese and bagels were mixed into the base, and the golden nectar was woven into the cream as it went into the pints.

There you have it. Salt bagel, cream cheese and honey ice cream. Extremely creamy. A little salty and some serious sweet.

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 (6/29/2012) 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!

June 14, 2012January 29, 2024

Smoked Strawberry Preserves with Candied Walnuts and Bleu

Sometimes flavor inspiration comes from the places we’d least expect it. This one was inspired by a salad. Specifically a spinach, walnut, strawberry and bleu cheese salad with balsamic vinaigrette. I mentioned to my wife how much I liked this particular salad, and she said “you should make an ice cream flavor out of it”. So I did. Or at least, my best interpretation of it. Minus the spinach.

That’s as good as the story gets. Strawberry season is upon us, so it was perfect timing to put this puppy to the test.

Starting with these gorgeous strawberries from Svihel farms in Foley, MN, that we picked up at our neighborhood farmers market, the Midtown Farmer’s Market

I opted to bypass the balsamic altogether, and instead smoke the strawberries and make a preserve out of them to add a different dimension to the flavor.

Onto the smoker they went..

Once they were finished with their applewood smoke bath, they were cooked down into a preserve to be swirled into the ice cream.

Smoky. Strawberry-y.

Then, the Fairbault Bleu Cheese. If you follow us at all, you know we’re no strangers to cheese, and the cave aged Fairbault Dairy cheeses are spectacular. This particular one is relatively mild, semi soft, and rife with wonderful moldy veins. Perfect for ice cream.

The St. Pete’s Select went into the ice cream as small chips and chunks so it is almost a secret dimension to the flavor, but doesn’t overwhelm it.

Finally, walnuts. At first I thought I’d add them in as plain salted walnuts, but at the last minute I decided to candy them, so they went into the ice cream with a salted toffee coating which gives them a little extra crunch.

The finished ice cream is rippled with the smoky strawberry preserves, studded with crunchy, salted and candied walnuts, all offset by little bits of bleu cheese. It’s a wild ride.

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 (6/15/2012) 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!

May 31, 2012

Smoked Bourbon Vanilla Bean

Since we’ve been on a bit of a spice kick with the Fennel Pollen and Baharat flavors in recent weeks, we thought we’d continue down the same path with a feature of the mainstay we’ve neglected until now -Vanilla. We use vanilla a lot, but haven’t given it a feature yet. Over the past few years we’ve kicked tons of different vanilla ideas around, but none have really stood out. That isn’t to say we don’t worship a classic vanilla bean or french vanilla flavor, but we wanted something a little more exciting.

We both spend a lot of time in front of the grill, regardless of the season, and have been doing it for far longer than we have been making ice cream together. You could say we’re a bit fanatical when it comes to cooking over a fire. So, when the idea of doing a smoked vanilla came up during a recent flavor meeting, it naturally resonated with both of us.

It starts with a quality vanilla bean. We have used many different forms of vanilla from various locations across the globe, but keep coming back to the Bourbon Vanilla bean for its dense vanilla flavor. Since we obviously don’t have a local source for it, we always search for a fair trade option.

Next comes the smoke. We explored and considered several different options for smoking the vanilla bean, including what wood to use, temperature, time, etc. We experimented with a few, and ended up using hickory for our wood, and smoking the vanilla bean with heat to dry it out. We learned a lot in the process and discovered some interesting variant paths both with different smoking wood and temperature, which we’ll certainly explore in future flavors.

Smokey the bean.

Once cooled, the whole beans were ground up to a fine powder, mixed and then steeped in the cream base before churning.

And that’s that. Smoked Bourbon Vanilla Bean. Would pair excellent with just about anything, especially if it was cooked over an open flame.

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 (6/1/2012) 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!