Ice Cream – FROZBROZ

April 24, 2014

White Chocolate Juniper

Spring is here and we are nearing the beginning of the growing season here in Minnesota. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, we still have a few winter flavors to download on y’all. This week’s inspiration came from chef Linton Hopkins of Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta. Reading a publication, I ran across his recipe for cheese pie, which included a number of different components including a juniper ganache made with white chocolate and juniper berries. That’s it! This week’s flavor was born – White Chocolate Juniper. Shall we?

These are juniper berries from Penzeys Spices. If you are wondering what juniper tastes like, pour yourself a shot of gin, as gin is flavored with juniper berries. The have a pungent pine flavor to them. For our ice cream base, we want to infuse the base with juniper, so the berries are crushed and added in. The ice cream base is cooked infusing the cream with juniper. Next is the addition of white chocolate.

This is 100% organic cocoa butter. Cocoa butter is the fat that is extracted from the cocoa bean. Generally, chocolate is made with a combination of cocoa butter, cocoa powder and sugar. White chocolate, on the other hand, is made using cocoa butter, sugar, vanilla, and usually, milk powder. It smells strong of cocoa powder, but is quite plain in flavor…almost flavorless. When in your mouth, it melts easily, and hits the same area on your palate that a bitter dark chocolate would, but it is very mild. We thought we would try and make a white chocolate ice cream from scratch, and since two of the major components to white chocolate are already in our ice cream (dairy, sugar), this seemed to be a no-brainer. After the the crushed juniper berries are infused into the ice cream base, we whisked in vanilla and cocoa butter to the hot base. The mixture is strained, and a few of the left over crushed juniper berries are added back into the base. The base is cooled and is ready for the churn.

White Chocolate Juniper ice cream! The juniper and white chocolate combine in harmony as their bitter qualities are tamed by the sweet cream vanilla base.

Like to try some? You can be one of two lucky winners of this fantastic, 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. Winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 4/25/14 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally. Prizes must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

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 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!

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!