Erik – Page 17 – FROZBROZ

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!

December 20, 2012

Gløgg

Winter and the holidays are upon us, which got us thinking about seasonal beverages. We can safely say that our go to holiday beverage is a whiskey eggnog. As frozen brothers, we generally slurp one of these down during weekly meetings this time of year. It was a year ago that we released our Eggnog with Whiskey Caramel ice cream. As for this week, we decided tohead back to our Scandinavian roots and work with a beverage that pretty much looks, smells, and tastes like the holidays. Gløgg! Let’s get started…

For those of you unfamiliar with gløgg, it is the Nordic version of mulled wine. It can be spelled many different ways, but staying true to our heritage, we decided to go with the Norwegian spelling. The variations of gløgg recipes are wide ranging, but two things it is certain to have are wine and spices. Our mulling blend above include cloves, cardamom pods, cinnamon sticks, raisins, almonds and orange zest.

We add Port, red wine, and a simple syrup of brandy and sugar to the blend.

The wines and spices get simmered down with a cover on for about an hour and then the mulling spices get strained out with a sieve.

The finished gløgg is ready for sipping. The flavors are deep and complex, yet so simple. It wreaks of winter and holidays and conjures up nostalgia as it hits your lips. As for our ice cream, the gløgg gets reduced down to a syrupy consistency. Some of the reduction gets added right into our brown sugar ice cream base. The remaining gløgg reduction gets added into a traditional caramel we made with granulated sugar. The gløgg caramel gets layered into our gløgg ice cream during packaging.

The result is an über holiday ice cream – rich, creamy, and deep with flavors of mulled wine and spice. The perfect ice cream for a winter holiday evening.

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 12/19 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!

December 6, 2012

Spiced Nuts

We’re continuing our holiday flavor tour this week with another nut infused ice cream. We got inspired back in October with our Black Walnut ice cream, and since, have been on a nut-infused ice cream making rampage. To go along with our holiday theme, we thought we would make a mixed bag and spice it up a little bit. After all, who doesn’t love a holiday party with a bowl of spiced nuts on the table? Let’s get this holiday party started right with this week’s flavor: Spiced Nuts.

Nuts! Raw nuts! From light to dark: Cashews, Almonds, Pecans. These make up the backbone of this flavor adding both rich flavors and creamy texture with all those natural nut oils.

First things first, nuts get laid out on a sheet pan and into the oven for a roast. The roasting brings out all those nutty flavors we are all familiar with.

After the roast, the nuts get crushed in the food processor, and then into our ice cream base for a hot steep. The mix gets chilled down in an ice bath and the crushed nuts get strained out, for a smooth nut cream base.

Now that we have our nut-infused ice cream we can get down to putting some spice into those nuts. Shortly after conceiving the idea for this week’s flavor, the December issue of Food and Wine magazine showed up, and what was in it? A nice recipe for Sugar-and-Spice Nuts. We liked it so much that we decided to use the three spices used in the recipe to spice up our nut cream. Check the recipe out for yourselves right here: Sugar-and-Spice Nuts. In the picture above starting at the bottom, moving clockwise: Cayenne Pepper, Chili Powder and Cinnamon. The spices get mixed into our nut cream along with a generous salting. Into the maker for a churn.

The result is a rich creamy nut-infused ice cream with a salty sweet and ever-so-slightly spicy finish.

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 12/07 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 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!