May 2015 – FROZBROZ

May 28, 2015

Bananas Foster

If you haven’t noticed, we’ve been on a major banana kick lately. It just works so fantastically well in ice cream – flavor, texture, all of it. So for this week’s flavor we go back to an old favorite dessert of both of ours – Bananas Foster. The cinnamon, the brown sugar, caramelized bananas, rum – it’s a tough combo to beat. Here’s our version in ice cream form.

First – the syrup. In traditional bananas foster the rum is typically used mostly for show at the end – to create a big flame up in the pan, garner some “oohs and aahs”, and put the finishing touches on caramelization. But the flavors are really about the brown sugar and cinnamon. So this syrup is just that – an invert syrup made with brown sugar, and cinnamon – and finished with a touch of rum.

Lest we forget the bananas. They need to be very ripe – almost overripe. Like we’ve done in all our previous banana flavors, the foundation of this ice cream is pretty much the same. The bananas get roasted and caramelized in the oven to maximize the flavor and are then pureed into the cream. The puree is added to an ice cream base that uses brown sugar instead of regular sugar and a touch of cinnamon as well.

We’re pretty in love with this banana ice cream base. Once we’ve given it a spin, the cinnamon rum syrup is swirled in at the end.

The final scoop: a silky roasted brown sugar banana ice cream decorated with ribbons of cinnamon rum syrup.

Bananas Foster Ice Cream

Brown Sugar Cinnamon Syrup Ingredients:

2 Cups Brown Sugar
1 Tablespoon Cinnamon
1 Cup Water
1 Tablespoon rum

Ice Cream Ingredients:

2 Ripe Bananas
2 tablespoons melted butter
2 Cups Heavy Cream
1 Cup Whole Milk
3/4 Cup Brown Sugar plus more for dusting bananas
2 Eggs
1 tsp cinnamon
1 teaspoons salt
1/2 Cup Cinnamon Syrup (recipe above)

Instructions:

1. Prepare the syrup (make ahead of time and chill): Combine the brown sugar, cinnamon and water in a heavy bottom pot and place on burner over medium/high heat. Bring to slow boil and then reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Watch closely because it can boil over lightning fast. Remove from heat. Let cool to room temperature and then add the rum and stir until incorporated. Chill further in refrigerator until you’re ready to make ice cream.

2. Prepare the ice cream: Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Chop the bananas into 1/2 inch chunks and toss with a the melted butter until coated. Place on sheet pan and dust with brown sugar. Place in oven and roast for approx 10-15 minutes or until bananas are starting to carmelize. Puree with the one cup of whole milk you will be using for the ice cream base and set aside.

Crack the eggs into a mixing bowl and whisk fully. Add brown sugar and whisk until sugar and eggs are combined. Add cream, banana puree, cinnamon and salt and whisk again until all are fully incorporated.

Place ice cream base in a pot over medium heat, stirring continuously. Continue to heat mixture until temperature reaches 165 degrees. Remove from heat. Cool the ice cream base to room temperature (an ice bath will do this in about 15-20 minutes) and then place in a container, cover, and chill in refrigerator overnight.

3. Churn ice cream base in ice cream machine according to manufacturer’s instructions. Place the ice cream into container and swirl in the cinnamon syrup. Freeze in a tightly covered container for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight if you can wait. Then, enjoy!

*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 5/29/15 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!

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!

May 13, 2015

Ginger Brown Butter Vanilla Bean

We haven’t done a vanilla centric flavor in awhile, so I took the opportunity this week to remedy that. While it’s true my sons are completely spoiled in their access to ice cream, the wide assortment of flavors we make are often complex and a little challenging for them. I wanted to tailor something more for them, especially with birthdays coming up – we HAD to have some kind of ice cream to eat with the cake. Hence, we arrived at this week’s flavor – very much a vanilla but tinted with just a twist as we do.

The process for this flavor is relatively simple – it’s all in the base.

First, the ginger is finely grated and added fresh to the cream base, along with fresh vanilla bean. Vanilla extract works fine in a pinch, but nothing compares to actual vanilla bean flavor. All of these flavors steep and infuse into the ice cream base during the cooking process – so it is important that they go in beforehand or their flavor will not be as intense.

A little bit of butter is browned in a pan, and whisked in once the ice cream base has reached a temp around 120 degrees Fahrenheit. If added in while the ice cream base is cold, it coagulates immediately and you get chunks of brown butter which you most likely don’t want. When added in while warm, it gets whisked into the base and emulsifies to become one. Harmonious brown butter flavor in an umami concert with ginger and vanilla bean and cream.

The scoop – a beautifully rich, ginger and brown butter tinted vanilla bean ice cream.

Ginger Brown Butter Vanilla Bean Ice Cream

(makes approx 1-1/2 quarts)

Ingredients:

2C Heavy Cream
1C Milk (use any fat percentage you prefer – higher lends to a creamier base)
2 Eggs
3/4C Sugar
1 Whole Vanilla bean
1Tablespoon of finely grated ginger
2Tablespoons of melted butter (browned)
1/2 tsp salt

Instructions:

Crack eggs into a mixing bowl and whisk fully. Add grated ginger, vanilla bean (scraped from pod) and sugar to eggs and whisk until all are combined well. Add cream,milk, salt and whisk again until all are fully incorporated. Note: You can add in the vanilla bean pod to steep during the cooking process for more vanilla flavor, but make sure to pull it out and discard before freezing the ice cream. Place ice cream mix in heavy pot and cook over medium heat, stirring continuously. Once mix reaches 115 degrees Fahrenheit, whisk in the melted browned butter until emulsified into the ice cream base. Continue to heat ice cream mixture until temperature reaches 165 degrees. Remove from heat. Cool the ice cream base to room temperature (an ice bath will do this in about 15-20 minutes). Once cool, place ice cream mix in a container, cover, and chill in refrigerator overnight.

3. Churn ice cream base in ice cream machine according to manufacturer’s instructions. Freeze in a tightly covered container for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight if you can wait. Then, enjoy!

*Yields approximately 2.5 pints of ice cream.

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 5/15/15 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!

May 4, 2015

Malted Banana – Vegan

A few years back, we had a flavor request from a woman whose family had owned a diner in Richfield, MN many years ago. She reminisced about her favorite malt there, malted banana. So this week, malted banana makes it’s come back, except we’re going to give it a little twist. We’re going dairy free with this one. It’s been a while, and the thought of a malted banana ice cream wrapped up in a coconut milk base seemed too hard to pass up. So we give you this week’s flavor; Vegan Malted Banana

First, our malted vegan coconut milk base. For the malt, we use a dark malted barley powder that we picked up at our local home brew store. It gets blended with cane sugar, a touch of vanilla, and the Aroy-D coconut milk that we purchased at the best Asian market in the North, United Noodles! The Aroy-D has a nice clean coconut milk flavor with the proper fat content to make a rich vegan ice cream. For our coconut bases, we blend in a pinch of xanthan gum to help emulsify the fat molecules that often separate in coconut milk.

For the bananas, we’re using ripe organic bananas that we slice into 1/2 inch discs. They’re laid out on a sheet pan lined with a silpat and roasted in the oven for about 25 minutes. The roasting decreases water content and condenses flavor. We’re always trying to decrease water content of ingredient add-ins, as they can give the ice cream an unwanted icy texture. That’s a FrozBroz no no. After roasting, the bananas are pureed in a blender with some of the malted coconut base. The entire malted banana ice cream base is heated to 165 degrees, cooled, and is ready to churn.

The result is a rich vegan malted banana ice cream, that we hope, will someday peak nostalgia in one of our ice cream fans. Cheers Wendy!

Malted Banana – Vegan

2 Ripe Organic Bananas
2 14oz. cans coconut milk(preferably Aroy-D)
3/4 Cup Organic Cane Sugar
2 Tablespoons Dark Malt Powder(can be found at your local home brew shop)
3/4 teaspoon Sea Salt
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon xanthan gum

Instructions:

1. Roast Bananas: Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Cut bananas into 1/2 inch discs and place on sheet pan lined with a silicone baking mat or parchment paper. Roast for 20-25 minutes until lightly browned.

2. Empty 2 cans of coconut milk into a blender. Add roasted bananas. Before blending, mix xanthan gum, malt powder and salt together in a bowl. With blender running on high, puree bananas in coconut milk and add powder mix. Once fully blended, pour mix into medium sauce pan. Add sugar and vanilla extract to base.

3. Cook/pasteurize ice cream base: Heat base, stirring occasionally, until temperature reaches 165-170 degrees. Remove from heat and cool 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. 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 5/8/15 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!