FrozBroz – Page 9

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!

May 17, 2012

Avocado with Chipotle Honey Candied Pepitas

For me, the onset of warm summer weather always brings mexican food to mind, but then again, so does any other type of weather. Needless to say, as we brainstorm flavor ideas, mexican inspired ideas regularly find their way into the fold. We had been thinking about wanting to incorporate pepitas (pumpkin seeds) into a flavor, as well as avocado. We almost kicked ourselves when we realized, of course, these two made perfect sense together. Once it hit us, we were off to the races.

Avocados are a fruit we would kill to be able to have a local source for. Unfortunately our climate makes that mostly impossible, so instead we look to fair trade and organic sources for one of natures most perfect creations, that just happen to be hitting their peak season now.

In this recipe, we puree the raw avocado into the cream base. It’s richness translates very nicely into the cream, and it provides a subtle yet forward flavor that is recognizable but not overwhelming. The process brought about other ways such as roasting and steeping as a means to incorporate, but for now we stuck with something straight forward. Man these things are tasty.

The pepitas were a fun twist to add to this flavor and provided both a welcome crunch as well as a little heat, and salt.

Since we enjoy messing with the add-ins as much as the base, we decided to go whole-hog on the mexican route, and threw some chipotle into the mix- but not before they were roasted and salted well.

For the candy coating, we went with pureed chipotles and Ames Farm honey.

The roasted pepitas were tossed in the mix while hot and allowed to bake a bit more before cooling. The final result was just short of a brittle.

To finish, the candied chipotle honey pepitas were thrown in right at the end of the churn.

Avocado with Chipotle Honey Pepitas

Would you 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 (5/18/2012) 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 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!