November 2012 – FROZBROZ

November 29, 2012

Roasted Chestnut Brown Butter

To continue the holiday theme – how about a flavor inspired by a song? “The Christmas Song”, more commonly known as “Chestunuts Roasting on an Open Fire” is a Christmas classic that was originally written in 1944 by Mel Torme; its most famous rendition is probably its first – performed by Nat King Cole. I’ve probably heard the song 500 times over the course of my life, and it was only a few years ago that I started to wonder what roast chestnuts would actually be like. In addition, I also wondered, who actually does this as a family tradition? Well, why not try them for the first time and make ice cream out of them too?

Chestnuts aren’t exactly easy to find, but pop up around Thanksgiving because of their use in stuffing. I noticed them in the produce section a few weeks back and figured to give it a shot.

Before being fired, the chestnuts need have a slit put in each nut, to keep them from popping as steam builds up inside while they are roasting. Then they get simmered in some salted water for a bit to add a bit of extra steam to the process and give them a nice salty coating.

Next, the chestnuts go onto a hot fire for about 15 minutes or so, being tossed often to keep them from burning on any sides. While they roasted we mixed up a batch of our brown butter base for these chestnuts to take a bath in.

It’s times like these that I kick myself for not taking enough pictures. Like one of the nutmeat before being ground.

That’s right, the nutmeat. Once these weird little nuts are peeled, they look like little beige brains. So we took them and ground them up to steep in the cream base while hot.

After steeping, we strained out the chestnut leftovers and gave it a spin in the maker.

The end result is a smooth, clean ice cream with hints of brown butter and a subtle but addictive sweet roast chestnut flavor.

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 11/30 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!

November 22, 2012

Cranberry w/ Apple Apple Cider Cognac Caramel

Happy Thanksgiving y’all! It’s finally upon us, and through all it’s traditions, the one that we’d like to focus on is the Fall harvest. After kicking off the pre-Thanksgiving party with our Roasted Pecan with Pumpkin Caramel, we couldn’t think of a more festive and appropriate ingredient for this weeks flavor than cranberries. Add apples to the mix, a little cognac for good cheer, and we’re talk’in Thanksgiving flavor of the week: Cranberry w/ Apple Apple Cider Cognac Caramel. Let’s get it started…

Cranberries! These are organic cranberries from James Lake Farms in Wisconsin Rapids, WI. Just the site of this bowl of berries can get you jammin right into the holiday spirit.

We’ve never made an actual cranberry flavored ice cream, so it seemed fitting that today be the day to make that happen.

Cranberries, like many other fruits and berries pose the ever occurring obstacle in ice cream: their water content can make the ice cream icy, unless manipulated in some way.

If you actually read this blog, you’ll know that we sound like a broken record with our talk of water content in fruits going into our ice cream. Good thing is, you’re still reading.

To counter the water content issue, we decided to make a chutney. We started it out with our berries, a mix of sugars, orange juice, and cognac.

The mixture gets simmered down, the cranberries pop, and eventually the chutney comes alive…

Bang-go! Vibrant, tart and toothsome cranberry chutney. We add the chutney into our ice cream base that we mixed with both cane and brown sugars.

Some of you may have read the title to this weeks flavor and thought, “dudes, typo…you totally put two “Apple(s)” in there”. Yeah, well, that’s pretty much what we did. The first of which are actual apples, diced, tossed with cinnamon and brown sugar, and then slowly roasted in the oven until candied and caramelly. In the end, we add these tiny apple chunkers to our other “apple”, the apple cider cognac caramel.

If you’re looking for an easy apple cider caramel sauce recipe, check out this one from The Cafe Sucre Farine blog. We adapted it to work in our ice cream, but the original is fantastic and explains the process well.

The two main players go head to head. Hoch Orchard organic apple cider, located right here in Minnesota along with Courvoisier Cognac.

After the caramel comes off the heat, we added in a little more Cognac to really bring out those brandy flavors and thin it out. The caramel provides a tart cider flavor that will undoubtedly pair well with the cranberry ice cream.

Our tiny roasted apple chunkers get added to the caramel and then layered into the ice cream during packaging.

The result is a sweet cranberry ice cream with a tart apple apple cider cognac caramel that characterizes the Fall harvest and gives us much to be thankful for. Cheers!

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 11/23 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!

November 15, 2012

Roasted Pecan w/ Pumpkin Caramel

Since we exhausted some of the most traditional Holiday flavors last year, we’re left with the challenge of digging deeper and looking at traditions of other cultures or finding new interpretations of the classics we love. A few years ago I experienced my first pumpkin pecan pie, and had my mind blown. Combine two favorites into one you say? Precisely. However, instead of making an ice cream full of pecan chunks, we chose to make a pecan flavored ice cream and ripple it with pumpkin caramel in hopes the two flavors would work in harmony rather than fight each other for the front seat.

Since we made the black walnut flavor a few weeks back, we’ve been fascinated about ice cream flavors steeped with nuts because the texture and flavors are so intense. The fat of the nut releases and combines with the cream, which brings the nut’s inherent flavor along with it. What you get is an ice cream that tastes exactly like the nut, but without any of the protein actually in the final product. We followed suit for this flavor and chose to make a steeped roasted pecan ice cream that screamed pecan, but with none of the chunks. Yeah, I love the chunks too – but its all about different and new experiences and we’re in love with this process.

First the pumpkin caramel. Step one – roast and puree pumpkin. No canned pumpkin here. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Thanks to a lovely blog we ran across in the past few months, the Vintage Mixer, we found a great recipe for pumpkin caramel and adapted it to work in this flavor. The pureed pumpkin is mixed with nutmeg, ginger, cloves, cinnamon and salt, and reduced with sugar and maple syrup.

We omitted the pumpkin seeds from our version in order to keep the ice cream free of rough terrain. Man its good!

Then we ground the roasted pecans into a powder and steeped them hot in the cream mix. Once they get their full steep on, we strain the chunks out to keep a smooth consistency.

Lastly, the pumpkin caramel is put down in layers as the ice cream goes into the pint.

The end result is a incredibly flavorful ice cream that screams traditional holiday flavors all bundled up into one. The pumpkin jumps out first and then is finished off nicely by a instantly recognizable roasted pecan flavor.

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 11/16 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!

November 8, 2012

Parsnip Graham Cracker

Ok, so we’ve pretty much been making graham cracker ice cream since the beginning of time. For real though, it’s one of the first flavors that we ever made and has serious credibility. As a child, I remember dunking graham crackers in my glass of milk, and sometimes just throwing a bunch of large chunks in a bowl with milk and eating it like cereal. The combo is timeless, and yet we still haven’t introduced you all to our plain graham cracker ice cream. And once again, we won’t this week either, because sometimes we just have to roll with a thought and see what becomes of it. So this week, we’re rocking our graham cracker ice cream infused with a little Fall flare: Parsnip Graham Cracker. Lets jam out…

These are parsnips y’all! Similar to a carrot, but sweeter. Parsnips are usually harvested after the first frost, and can often stay in the ground all winter long if covered with straw. The longer they stay in the ground during cold months, the sweeter they become as their starches turn to sugars.

We are infusing our ice cream with parsnip flavor, so first thing we’re going to do is peel, chop, toss with butter and roast in the oven until they are soft and aromatic.

The roasted parsnips then get thrown into our brown sugar ice cream base to steep overnight. The mixture is strained and then ready for a churn. The brown sugar itself gives the ice cream base a butterscotch quality, but with the addition of the parsnips, their naturally butterscotch-esk flavor makes for a double down.

Now we need to crank out some graham cracker chunkers to add in at the end of the churn.

We have perfected our graham cracker chunkers over the years, so they are crunchy in the ice cream and not soft. We start by crushing whole graham crackers, then adding butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and salt.

The mixture gets pressed into a pan or glass dish and baked in the oven until browned and smelling like ridiculously amazing graham crackers. They’re done.

Graham cracker chunkers all broken up and ready to add into our parsnip ice cream at the end of the churn.

The result is a smooth creamy parsnip ice cream with salty spiced graham cracker chunkers.

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 11/9 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!

November 1, 2012

White Russian

Yes, unfortunately this flavor comes the day after halloween – but apropos nonetheless, in honor of one of our favorite movies The Big Lebowski and those who chose to don the threads of Walter Sobchak, Donny or maybe even the Dude himself as their Halloween costume of choice. If nothing else, this flavor would be perfect for nursing back into working condition those who imbibed in true halloween fashion.

Alcohol is always a tricky one with ice cream because its low freezing temperature messes with the process of the ice cream freezing properly. Conversely, its no fun to make an ice cream based on a drink and not have any alcohol in it. We found a happy middle ground by leaving out the (flavorless) vodka and sticking with a clean cream base and Kahlua as the main alcohol/flavor component.

In order to get it to a point where it was present in the flavor but not wrecking the consistency we chose to use it 2 separate ways. The star would be a caramel (as we are wont to do) made by reducing the Kahlua with sugar into a thick syrup and then thinning it out a bit with some straight Kahlua to get the full flavor with the alcohol.

Once finished with the caramel, we moved onto the base. To represent the cocktail as closely as possible, we went with a straight cream base and used confectioner’s sugar to provide an extra clean sweetness, and added a little more Kahlua to the mix to shine through ever so subtly without ruining the cream’s ability to freeze.

To finish off, a Filbert of course. Since any true White Russian isn’t served without its hazelnut garnish, we threw in a handful of crushed hazelnuts to provide a little crunch and accent to the sweetness of the cream.

The end result was a perfect match – a simple White Russian cocktail flavored ice cream striped with gooey Kahlua caramel and peppered ever so lightly with a filbert garnish.
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 11/2 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!