January 2013 – FROZBROZ

January 31, 2013January 29, 2024

Lime w/ Macadamia and Ginger Caramel

We are going to keep the beach vibes going this week to shed more warmth on these harsh winter months. Recently we rolled out our Coconut & Mangosteen Caramel, Jasmine Citrus Saffron and Georgia Walnut. This week, we’re back at it with another tropical inspired flavor jumble with our Lime w/ Macadamia and Ginger Caramel. Let’s do this!

Lime lime! Limes! Lime! So these are limes. First, we zest. Then, roll them out and juice em. The juice is poured into a sauce pan with equal parts sugar, then reduced into a syrup. The syrup and lime zest are both added to our ice cream base to ensure full lime limeness. It’s ready for the churn.

Ginger! I had been watching Top Chef a few weeks back and for those who are familiar, there are contests every episode called “quickfire” challenges. This one in particular made use of ginger. Someone on the show made a ginger caramel, and I instantaneously knew that this was going in one of our next flavors. This week’s flavor was designed around the idea of this ginger caramel. The process was not divulged on the show, but we’ve made caramel hundreds of times, and intuition had me peeling and grating the ginger first.

Next, the ginger got heated with cream, steeped to fully infuse, and then strained out of the cream. Next, we made a traditional caramel by boiling plain granulated sugar until caramelized. The ginger-infused cream is then added into the boiling caramelized sugar, salted, and bang-go! Ginger caramel!

Our last addition – macadamia nuts. They add texture and crunch. Their nutty buttery flavor hits at the end of each bite. We keep them plain and simple, and add into the ice cream at the end of the churn.

The results are in…rich and creamy lime ice cream layered with salty ginger caramel finished with the crunch and nuttiness of buttery macadamia nuts. Summer’s favorite flavor? Nah, winter’s favorite 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 2/1 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!

January 24, 2013

Georgia Walnut

The past few weekly flavors have been inspired by delusions of beaches and warmer weather; happy thoughts to escape the harsh reality of our midwestern winter. While my frozen counterpart enjoys a nice warm weather vacation this week, I remain in the Cities, proudly and hatefully enduring sub zero temperatures which will only harden me and make me enjoy 30 degrees for the remainder of the winter so much more (right?).

This flavor represents the true meaning of Nordic endurance: pure indulgence that only a deep winter freeze can truly incite – something to dull the pain of frostbite, lack of sun and society. Specifically important keys to this equation: Chocolate and Booze.

Background: A few years ago my Pops clued me in to one of his favorite new dessert finds, the Georgia Walnut Pie at the Harbor View Cafe in Pepin, Wisconsin. Being the fiend for pecan pie that I am, a new nutty pie treat piqued my interest. The Georgia Walnut pie is an incredibly rich concoction of chocolate, walnuts, cinnamon and butter – a chorus of flavors that will melt the elastic in your socks and cause momentary amnesia. As soon as I had it, I knew it was an ice cream flavor. Add in a last minute improv of bourbon and you’ve suddenly created the perfect company for your January misery. Typically we tell people that our ice cream isn’t meant for large quantities because we don’t cut corners when it comes to sugar and fat. For this week, all bets are off.

To bring this flavor full circle I chose to create a Bourbon Walnut jam of sorts, by slowly reducing crushed walnuts with brown sugar and water until the flavor of the walnuts is infused into a thick – jam like reduction. It looks like a caramel because of the color from the brown sugar, but the sugar is never cooked to a point where it technically caramelizes. What you end up with is Jam.

The bourbon finishes it off to give it a well rounded kick. Or maybe a roundhouse kick. You decide.

The ice cream base is essentially our 3x Chocolate spiced with Cassia Cinnaomon.

The ice cream is churned and the Bourbon Walnut Jam is layered and rippled throughout the pint.

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 1/25 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!

January 17, 2013

Jasmine Citrus Saffron

We flavor storm a ton of ideas for our weekly flavors each month, and many times they get pushed aside for a better one, or just get caught up in the mix of too many ideas. This week, we revisit one of those flavors that we left behind as it breathes life into this cold winter month, and conjures up images of warmth and color. Let’s get started with this weeks flavor: Jasmine Citrus Saffron

There are countless varieties of rice, all of which have their own special flavor and textural characteristics. Steeping rice in our cream works great, as all those unique flavors inundate the cream. We wanted this flavor to feel light and perfumed, so we decided to use Jasmine rice as one of our base components. Jasmine has a natural sweet floral tone to it that seemed fitting to pair with the floral honey-esk flavors of saffron. We par-cooked the jasmine, then steeped in our cream along with the saffron threads, creating the backbone for our ice cream base. The rice gets strained after the steep, and our base is ready for the churn.

It’s citrus season in California and Florida, and in keeping with our theme to stay warm and light, we wanted to make a citrus syrup to layer into our jasmine/saffron base. The oranges, grapefruit, lemon and limes first get zest-ed, then juiced.

The citrus juice, zest and sugar are heated in a sauce pan and steeped. The zest is strained out, and the simple syrup is reduced into a syrup that is similar to honey or maple syrup in consistency. This tart citrus syrup is cooled and layered into the jasmine/saffron ice cream during packaging.

Bang-go! Sweet, creamy and floral jasmine/saffron infused ice cream with a tart citrus syrup. It’s just another flavor that was almost left behind, but now, will give you summer’s warmth during our coldest months of winter.

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 1/18 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!

January 10, 2013

Coconut & Mangosteen Caramel

We’re entering the middle of January when the true doldrums of a Midwestern winter take hold, and you can’t help but dream of a warm paradise somewhere closer to the equator. With no sunny beach in my future for this winter, I get my kicks by enjoying the fruits (no pun intended) of such places to remind me of what I could have. Maybe its a bit sadistic, but I enjoy it. As an aside, in the 90 odd flavors we’ve put up on this blog so far, we have yet to do one friendly to the dairy free and vegan audiences. This marks our first flavor in both of those categories.

I first was introduced to the strange fruit through a short story in one of my college lit classes (the title of which I’ve forgotten) and have always been curious about it. Native to Indonesia and South America, for a long time they were illegal in the U.S. due to fears of harboring Asian fruit fly. You can find them fresh now, but you’ll still have to do some hunting. Since we weren’t able to get our hands on any fresh, we went the canned route (we’re making a caramel with them anyway) and picked them up with our coconut milk at our often lauded haunt – United Noodles.

Again with the little brains. What does this mean?

For this flavor we chose to do a Mangosteen caramel that would be layered into the base and provide a truly tropical version of a coconut caramel.

Hinted with a bit of fresh ginger

The mangosteen was pureed and strained to remove the seeds and fibers, and then combined with the fresh ginger, sugar and boiled down into a nice flowable caramel.

Next, the coconut ice cream. Coconut milk works wondefully for a dairy free/vegan option because it has a high enough fat content to freeze without being icy. With organic cane sugar and some organic vanilla, you’d never know the difference. (As long as you don’t loathe coconut).

Finally after churning the coconut base, the Mangosteen caramel was layered in as the pints were packed.

What we end up with is a deliciously creamy coconut ice cream with a bright, lightly fruity, mangosteen caramel.

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 1/11 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!

January 3, 2013

Maple Maple Swirl

Happy New Year y’all! The holidays are sadly behind us, but alas, a new FrozBroz flavor is right before us. As we’ve mentioned before, we take inspiration for our flavors from just about anything, anyone, anywhere. This week, it was a holiday gift idea from our buds Jill and Derrick Pulvermacher that had the stars aligning for our flavor: Maple Maple Swirl.

It turns out that Derrick’s father, Jerry Pulvermacher, produces a small lot of fantastic maple syrup every year with a few of his buddies in Plain, WI. Jill and Derrick thought it would be nice gift idea if we could create a flavor that featured Jerry’s maple syrup. How could we resist?

The maple syrup hand-off was made and history begins. About ten years ago Jerry and some of his friends started making maple syrup. It was the start of a hobby, and one that was likely a good excuse to have a few beers in the woods with the guys. In their first year they only tapped about 75-80 tress and produced 1-2 gallons just for themselves. The sap was originally cooked over a fire in an open pan. As time went on, demand increased as more people got their lips on their syrup. The guys tapped more and more trees each year, and about 5 years ago, they purchased an evaporator and started bottling and selling. In 2011 they tapped 350 trees and ended up with 160 gallons of syrup. That’s a lot, right? Well, I was pretty shocked to find out that it takes 50 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of maple syrup. You can do the math on that one. In 2012 they tapped 650 trees and only produced 165 gallons of syrup. If you remember, last years winter was mild, and Spring was warm. It’s a true snap shot of how climate change can really effect maple syrup producers. We have our fingers crossed for Jerry and his buddies down in Plain, WI because their maple syrup is liquid gold, and we hope they keep producing for years to come. If you’re in the area, you can find their syrup at local restaurants and cheese shops in and around Wisconsin Dells as well as the Wollersheim Winery.

For the ice cream, we wanted to slap Jerry right in the face with the intense maple flavor of his syrup. We decided we needed to flavor the ice cream base with the syrup, and also, make a reduction to swirl in as a sort of maple syrup caramel. As ice cream makers, the dilemma once again, is making sure that we aren’t adding too much water content to our mix, as the texture will become icy and undesirable.

To avoid that, we once again, boil the syrup down and reduce it to a thick caramel consistency.

The syrups sugars are now condensed enough that it flows off of a spoon more like honey than maple syrup. At this point, we set aside some of the reduction for layering into the pints during packaging, and we reduce the remaining syrup a little more before adding it straight into our ice cream base. The ice cream mix is heavily salted before churning.

The result is a dense salty creamy maple ice cream layered with pockets of reduced Hilltop Sugar Bush Maple Syrup. Cheers, Jerry!

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 1/4 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!