Minneapolis Ice Cream – Page 7

June 7, 2012

Peanut Butter and Spicy Coconut Curry

Up until now, we haven’t really discussed what makes a quality ice cream in the marketplace. There are obviously many factors that play into an ice creams’ overall quality, but as far as Federal standards are concerned we are talking about the amount of milkfat in the ice cream, and the amount of overrun. Overrun is the volume of air that is incorporated into the ice cream, and Federal standards allow for as little as 10% milkfat and as much as 100% overrun, meaning half of your ice cream is ice cream and the other half is air. This is standard practice for many commercial ice creams in our stores and why we see such a huge discrepancy in prices. There are differing designations for qualities, with the highest being “super premium”, which means milkfat content is somewhere between 14-16% and overrun is 25% or less. Super premium is where our product resides and always will. If there was an Ultra super premium designation, we would be in it, because our ice cream has high milkfat content and overrun of less than 25%. Next time you’re at the store, pick up a few differently priced pints and notice that some are heavier than others. When it comes to ice cream, typically the heavier the pint, the higher the quality. With our low overrun ice cream comes a texture difference as well. It is rich, creamy and more dense, which means it takes longer to breakdown in your mouth. And that’s good because you have longer to savor the flavor. So why are we bringing up this topic of quality now? Well, partly because we go to great lengths, (including controlling the pasteurization process) to make the highest quality ice cream possible. Second, as a consumer, the more you know the better right? Third, and most importantly, this weeks flavor is the epitome of quality in terms of low overrun. So lets get started…

This is peanut buttery goodness, and it was ground fresh from whole peanuts over at the Seward Coop just hours before hitting the creams. I mean, how cool is it to step up to a machine that is full of peanuts, press a button, and out squirts beautiful peanut butter? Maybe not that cool if you have a peanut allergy, but hey, it’s just a fantastic thing for peanut butter lovers. That’s us. The peanut butter gets whisked into the cream while we heat it up along with…

Coconut! As we do with our Seven Layer Bar ice cream, we toast the coconut before steeping it in our cream, which really intensifies the coconut flavors and infuses it into our base.

Mmmmmm, coconut milk. What would a curry be without coconut milk? Have you ever seen this brand before? You can get this and about five other brands you’ve never seen before over at United Noodles in Minneapolis. Please go there. If not for the largest selection of Asian grocery items from 15 different counties, then at least check out their new Deli(Unideli) for lunch. Either way, you won’t be disappointed.

The coconut milk gets added into the cream with the peanut butter and toasted coconut.

Ok, so this is where it gets interesting. When we order Thai food, we generally hit up True Thai. In our opinions, it’s some of the best Thai food Minneapolis has to offer, and it’s one of our neighborhood faves. This weeks flavor draws all inspiration from True Thai’s Rama Spinach Curry with Roasted Peanuts dish,

which incorporates a red curry paste, like this one, with peanuts and coconut milk. It’s served with rice, steamed spinach and bean sprouts. Fantastic! The idea just seemed like it would work in ice cream.

This particular red curry paste is made with chilies, lemongrass, shallots, kafir lime, galangal and spices (coriander, cumin, and cardamom). We stir it in with all the others during heating/steeping.

After our base is heated and all ingredients are steeped, we strain it through a fine mesh strainer to achieve an ultra smooth base ready for the churn.

Peanut Butter and Spicy Coconut Curry ice cream. The viscosity of the peanut butter gave our ice cream makers a workout and by the end of the churn appeared to have virtually 0% overrun, making for uber richness. This weeks pints really do out weigh the competition!

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 (6/8/2012) 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 24, 2012

Bahārāt

One of my favorite cookbooks is “A Mediterranean Feast” by Clifford A. Wright. The book brings together the historical and culinary histories of all the diverse cuisines found in the Mediterranean. It is in this book that I was first introduced to bahārāt. Bahārāt means “spice” in Arabic, and is derived from the word bahār, which means “pepper”, so it is usually a spice blend containing pepper. In the Middle East, bahārāt is used in many savory dishes, and up until now, that is what I have used it for as well. The blend that I generally use contains pepper, allspice, cinnamon and ginger. Just reading that ingredient list could have anyone thinking it’s going into a sweet dish, but a pinch or two in your lamb burgers…mind blowing and life changing. This is of course why I started thinking that bahārāt could make a killer ice cream. It has both sweet and savory aspects, and oh, not to mention mind blowing attributes. And since bahārāt is a spice blend, the list of spices span a wide range depending on the origin of the dish. So lets get to work…

Here are the players in the bahārāt that we’ve blended specifically for FrozBroz Craft Ice Cream. We always use whole spices whenever possible and if you must know, all of these came from Penzeys Spices. Penzeys is as local as it gets for a spice store in Minneapolis, with their origins coming from the Broz home state of Wisconsin. In the picture, let’s move left to right and start with the proverbial Cinnamon sticks, followed by Nutmeg, Allspice, Cloves, Coriander, Peppercorn mix, and in the middle, Cardamom.

Spice party! Let’s grind!

This party is grinding down. Bahārāt is now ready to be tossed into our ice cream base and churned.

FrozBroz Bahārāt Ice Cream! The explosion of spice hits immediately and continues to unfold as the ice cream melts in your mouth.

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 (5/25/2012) 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!

May 10, 2012

Lemon Poppy Sour Cream Chevre with Rhubarb Compote

If you’re a vegetable gardener in Minnesota (and even if you’re not) you probably know that it’s prime season for one of the first harvested vegetables here in the North – Rhubarb! There is a lot of talk right now in the local culinary community about getting more out of this underutilzed vegetable that is so plentiful in many of our gardens this time of year. I think it’s safe to say that when someone mentions rhubarb, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a dessert, say maybe rhubarb pie, or rhubarb crisp(check out last years rhubarb crisp flavor HERE). And being that we are ice cream makers, this one is going to be a dessert as well – Lemon Poppy Sour Cream Chevre with Rhubarb Compote.

We’ve mentioned before that we get inspiration for our flavors from a wide range of sources, and sometimes it’s simply from seeing a recipe on a television show or a magazine. I ran across a lemon poppy cheesecake recipe a month or so ago that had me thinking about all of these flavors in ice cream.

So to get started I rocked out a cheesecake-esk ice cream base using the following four ingredients…lemon zest, poppy seeds, sour cream – from Westby Creamery in Westby, WI and chevre cheese – from Donnay Dairy in Kimball, MN

Together these flavors make a nice rich, creamy flavorful backbone for the rhubarb compote to sit with.

Rhubarb! This is from a rhubarb plant that goes back three generations on my in-laws side of the family. It is essential heirloom rhubarb, and it is beautiful!

Rhubarb gets choppy chopped and into a pan with sugar, orange zest and a vanilla bean. We simmer it down and evaporate as much liquid as possible.

At this point we toss in a little Elderflower liqueur, which deepens the compote’s flavor and gives it a nice floral tone.

The finished rhubarb compote is thick and jammy with a perfect balance of sweet and tartness. We be Jammin. It gets layered in to the pints during packaging leaving little tart flavor pockets among the rich lemon poppy sour cream chevre ice cream.

Lemon Poppy Sour Cream Chevre with Rhubarb Compote! More Minnesota Grown vegetables used the FrozBroz way.

We have 2 days left in our fundraising campaign on Indiegogo. If you haven’t donated already and can help, we would really appreciate it. You can donate on our site by clicking here: INDIEGOGO/FROZBROZ

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 (5/11/2012) 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!

Would you like to see more of this kind of ice cream or be able to buy it online? Then please, help us with our fundraiser on indiegogo, we only have 2 DAYS left and need all the help we can get! And in exchange you’ll be one of the first to get our ice cream. Visit our page at www.indiegogo.com/frozbroz