Peanut Butter – FROZBROZ

May 21, 2015

Peanut Butter and Bacon

Have you ever had a burger with peanut butter and bacon? I hadn’t until recently, and it was shockingly delicious. So shocking delicious that I thought it would make for a shockingly delicious ice cream. Turns out, it is! Let’s get started with this week’s flavor – Peanut Butter and Bacon.

Organic peanut butter. Creamy organic peanut butter. Very creamy organic peanut butter. It’s all of those things, and it is what we are using to make our peanut butter base. For this flavor, I decided to use a brown sugar base to add more depth and caramel tones. The peanut butter is added to the base and pasteurized by cooking to 165 degrees F. Just like adding regular butter to our ice cream, the added fat from the peanut butter tends to separate. If not emulsified, the ice cream will leave a film on your mouth and on the utensil you use to eat it. To emulsify, the ice cream base gets run through a blender on high speed. After an ice bath cool down, the ice cream is ready to churn.

Not before preparing our bacon though. Not just bacon. Candied bacon. I chose to candied the bacon, for one, because after all, it is going into ice cream. Secondly, I want to get a relatively hard layer on the outside of the meats, so the ice cream doesn’t soften it over time, making it chewy and unpalatable. FYI, nitrate free bacon here. Thick cut deliciousness. The bacon is given a rub down with brown sugar. In to the oven until caramelized. I like to cool my bacon on a wire rack to achieve a full crunch factor. Once cooled, the bacon is chopped up and is ready to toss into the peanut butter ice cream at the end of the churn.

The finished product results in an intensely creamy peanut butter ice cream with sweet and salty bits of candied bacon. It’s shockingly delicious!

Peanut Butter and Bacon

1 # Bacon, thick cut
1/3 cup Brown Sugar

2 cups Heavy Cream
1 cup Milk
1/2 cup Brown Sugar
1/2 cup Peanut Butter, creamy
2 Eggs
1 1/8 teaspoons Sea Salt

Instructions:

1. Candied Bacon(makes enough for the ice cream and extra to eat!): Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Line a sheet pan with foil. In a bowl, toss the bacon with 1/3 cup brown sugar until evenly coated. Lay bacon on sheet pan in a single layer. Bake in oven for 30-40 minutes until crisp. Check bacon periodically after 25 minutes to make sure it doesn’t burn. Remove from oven, and move bacon slices to wire rack to cool. Once cool, freeze bacon, and then chop frozen bacon into 1/4 inch bits.

2. Make ice cream base: Crack eggs into a mixing bowl and whisk fully. Add brown sugar and whisk. Add heavy cream, milk, peanut butter and salt. Whisk until ingredients are combined. Peanut butter will break up and incorporate as the base is heated in step 3.

3. Cook/pasteurize ice cream base: Over medium heat, whisk or stir base continuously. Keep stirring continuously until temperature reaches 165-170 degrees. Remove from heat and place half of the base in a blender (***DANGER! BE CAREFUL BLENDING HOT LIQUIDS***). Blend on high for 20 seconds. Pour into a clean bowl. Repeat blending process with remaining ice cream base. Cool blended ice cream base to room temperature (an ice bath will do this in about 15-20 minutes). Put base in a clean container, cover, and chill in refrigerator overnight.

4. Churn ice cream base in ice cream machine according to manufacturer’s instructions. Add 1/3 cup of candied bacon to ice cream at the end of the churn. Store ice cream in air tight container in freezer until chow time.

*Yields approximately 2.5 pints

If you’d rather not make it, you can be one of two lucky winners of 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. Two winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 5/22/15 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally in Minneapolis. Prizes must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

December 25, 2014

Julekage Peanut Butter

Merry Christmas! Nostalgia runs wild this time of year, and for many many years of my life Christmas was not complete without my Grandma’s Julekage. If you’re not familiar, Julekage is a dense scandinavian christmas bread most definable by raisins and cardamom. We always ate it for breakfast, toasted and slathered with peanut butter – thus the inspiration for this week’s celebratory flavor.

Rather than make croutons out of the Julekage which we often do with baked goods, we chose to deconstruct the Julekage and use it’s main components. For the base of the ice cream, we infused with toast scrapings to duplicate the toasted bread flavor, and paired that with cardamom.

We haven’t used peanut butter enough in ice cream, it’s true. For this flavor we thin it out with cream and make it into a sauce, and layer in.

Last but not least, the raisins are added in at the end.

The final result is a cardamom and toast ice cream, swirled with peanut butter and studded with raisins. Just like Grandma’s Christmas Julekage.

You can be one of two lucky winners of 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. Two winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 12/26/14 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally in Minneapolis. Prizes must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

January 1, 2014

Peanut Butter with Roasted Bananas

Happy new year, guys! It’s January 2014, which means a lot to us at FrozBroz. It means that our ice cream will officially be for sale this month. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for announcments regarding this exciting new time for our ice cream’s existence.

As for this week, we’re dropping another bit of FrozBroz nostalgia. We all have memories of friends coming over to play after school, and likely your parents whipped up something for you and your friends to eat or snack on, just as mine did. It’s possible we all share this same bit of nostalgia. For me, one of the most memerable lunch/snacks my mother ever put in front of me was a peanut butter and banana sandwich. She always served it open faced – white bread, creamy peanut butter, and thick banana slices. So successful that my friends who were over, loved it as much as I did. So successful, that this week, I’m going to put the peanut butter and bananas in our ice cream. It’s a classic combination, and one that is close to me. Let’s get 2014 kicked off right, with this week’s flavor: Peanut Butter with Roasted Bananas.

I flip-flopped a lot before deciding which part of this flavor should be the ice cream; peanut buter or banana? Ultimately, I decided that a peanut butter ice cream would probably go over better, as most of you that follow us Broz, are peanut butter freaks. For the ice cream base, we use fresh ground peanut butter ground at the Seward Co-op. The peanut butter is added to our pure sugar cane base, cooked, and then strained through a fine mesh strainer. The base is salted and is ready to churn.

FYI, to let you in on a little secret…someone’s grinding up fresh ground artisinal peanut butters to sell over at our new kitchen space, CityFoodStudio. Keep your eyes peeled.

Speaking of peeled, let’s talk roasted bananas. Again, as we always talk the talk, we work to decrease the water content of our fruit and increase natural sugars to reduce iciness in the ice cream. These very not local bananas are sliced and roasted in the oven on parchment until caramelly. Their flavors are concentrated and ready to be added into our peanut butter ice cream at the end of the churn.

Peanut Butter with Roasted Bananas! Brining in the new year with some FrozBroz nostalgia.

Like to try some? 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 1/3/14 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!

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!