Oat Ice Cream – FROZBROZ

July 18, 2013

Oat with Mulberry Syrup

This week we’re taking on a lesser-known berry, but one that is found growing wild all over the city of Minneapolis – Mulberries. It’s one that is underutlized, but can channel deep rich berry flavor that usually isn’t associated with the species. We decided to pair the Mulberries with one of our favorite breakfast ice cream bases – oat, which brings us to this week’s flavor: Oat with Mulberry Syrup. Let’s get started!

Hopefully everyone knows what oats are, or at least look like. If not, take a good look…these are oats, and we are going to steep them in our ice cream base. And if you were to eat our ice cream steeped in oats, you’d love love love it. The oats are added while cooking our organic cane sugar base. During the process, they release their starches into the cream making for an ultra rich and velvety texture accompanied by their natural nuttiness. After steeping, the oats are strained out and the base is ready to churn.

Mulberries!! Thanks to our friend Christine for the major loot of Mulberries! Christine and her hubby own a vacant lot next door to their house in Uptown. There, Christine has created an extremely diverse and ambitious garden of both fruits and vegetables. Cucmbers, beans, tomatoes, watermelons, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, asparagus, apples, plums, and cherries just to name a few. Oh, and mulberries…and they are beauties. And they’re going in our ice cream in the form of mulberry syrup.

For the syrup, we first crush the berries using a potato masher and a hand-held pastry blender. After the juices are crushed out, the mulberries are strained out leaving only the juice. If you’ve never eaten a mulberry picked off of the tree, they could be described as a watered-down version of a blackberry. Because of their watered-down flavor, they are less saught after, but it is the exact reason why we first reduce the juice down by boiling. Once the juice has reduced, we add our organic cane sugar and reduce a bit more until a syrupy conistancy is achieved. The syrup is cooled and is ready to get layered into the pints during packaging.

It’s breakfast ice cream. Ultra creamy oat ice cream layered with intense mulberry syrup. Trying to put this lesser known berry on the map. Love, 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 7/19/13 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 27, 2012

Oat Granola with Caramel Apples

The autumnal equinox has now past, so we have officially moved into Fall. The weather outside is showing it too, with twenty and thirty degree temperature fluctuations between night and day. The sun is rising later and setting sooner, which makes us all antsy to get out and get the most out of our days while we can. One of those great fall traditions that I shared with my family was hitting up the local apple orchard for picking, sipping cider, and if we were lucky, chowing a caramel apple. And that’s the inspiration for this weeks FrozBroz flavor: Oat Granola with Caramel Apples. Lets get to it!

My three year old son is crazy for granola and yogurt, which pretty much makes it a morning staple at our house with the addition of some sort of fruit. Fruit and granola go hand in hand, so I thought it would make a nice base flavor for this weeks ice cream.

Our granola is comprised of rolled oats, almonds, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, flax seeds, honey, brown sugar, oil, cinnamon and vanilla.

Everything gets tossed together and baked on a parchment lined baking sheet at a low temperature. It warms the house, and the aroma reeks of Fall.

This granola gets thrown into our brown sugar ice cream base and steeps over night. During the steeping process, the oats, seeds, and nuts break down and soften up releasing their starches into the ice cream base. After the granola gets pressed through a fine mesh strainer, the result is an ice cream base packed with oat starch, making for an ultra rich granola flavored ice cream.

Apples! Hoch Orchard Organic Gala Apples to be precise. I’ve found that I really dig Gala apples when making ice cream. As we always preach, one of our biggest challenges with fruit is getting out moisture content so it’s not icy the creams. Not that Galas aren’t moist, but they have a classic sweet apple flavor and when cooked down or baked, their juices condense with that powerfully sweet apple flavor.

And that’s just what we do with them. The apples get pealed, diced and tossed with a little butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and vanilla. They’re placed on a parchment lined sheet pan and slow roasted in the oven until dehydrated and condensed in to soft apple pillow chunkers. Caramel time!

So we make a traditional caramel starting with just plain sugar and a little water. It gets boiled down until it turns an amber color and starts smoking a bit, at which point we add in our cream, stir, and that’s it! We have caramel!

We pour the hot caramel over our roasted apple chunkers and here’s what you get. Caramel Apple Chunkers! They get tossed into the ice cream at the end of the churn.

The final result is a rich creamy granola flavored ice cream with chewy caramel apple chunks. And that’s the beginning of Fall in a scoop.

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 on Friday 9/28 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback or else 🙂 . Good luck!

February 2, 2012

Oat with Maple Brown Sugar

Since we got the breakfast creams started last week, we decided, why not keep a good thing going. This is our second installment of breakfast flavors that are really inspired by the season. The sun is still low in the sky, and all anyone wants to do is lay in bed a little longer, drink coffee, and slowly work your way to making a comforting breakfast. Of course, all while wearing pajamas.

Oats are not something that we’ve used in our ice cream before. They are high in starch content, and in our past experiences, vegetables high is starch pose bigger challenges to balance texture. In the case of oats, we have found a starch match made in heaven for our ice cream.

These are the organic regular rolled oats that we purchase at our haunt, The Seward Coop, from Whole Grain Milling Company located in Welcome, MN.

Welcome to our ice cream base oats. This is when the magic starts to happen. We slowly bring our base to a simmer with the oats, and then allow to steep for a few hours. During this cooking/steeping process the oats release their starches into our ice cream base; the same starches that make oatmeal so delicious and creamy. The base gets strained through a fine sieve before getting churned in the maker.

The oats provide a subtle flavor profile that is so familiar yet is almost forgotten because of the texture take over of it’s starches.

This is Wild Country Maple Syrup from Lutsen, MN. We incorporate it with some brown sugar and bring it to a quick simmer.

The uncaramelized maple brown sugar sauce is reminiscent of the graininess that brown sugar and maple syrup have when stirred into hot oatmeal. We layer the sauce into the pints.

The starch match made in heaven results in a rich, dense, ultra smooth ice cream with a sweet mapley sauce layered in.

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 (2/03/2012) 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!