Erik – Page 18 – FROZBROZ

October 25, 2012

Cream Cheese Zucchini Bread

Even though we have, for the most part, moved out of the harvest season, there are still flavors that we never had a chance to bring to life. This is due to the fact that when choosing from the enormous array of local fruits and vegetables, we want to showcase our top picks for the season. This week, we wanted to step back and remember one of the “passed by”; Zucchini! It’s one that we passed by in the prime of it’s season, but wasn’t forgotten. Heck, you might even be able to find a few late-harvested zucchini at one of this year’s last Farmers’ Markets this weekend. With that, let’s jam out this week’s flavor: Cream Cheese Zucchini Bread.

Zucchini bread is one of those things that was around a lot when I was a kid. You know how it is in the Midwest during the month of August? Everyone who has a garden is trying to download their monster zucchinis off on everyone else. My mom must have been a taker of many, because it seemed like there was always another in queue.

It’s the Midwesterner’s coffee cake. So I thought, let’s put it in the ice cream.

Using my mom’s age old recipe we started with whole zucchinis and shredded them up. The other standards get added; eggs, sugar, flour, oil, cinnamon and into the oven.

And there you have it – classic zucchini bread! Slice it, butter it and it’s chow time. Only thing, it would become a mushy mess if we added it to our ice cream at this point in the bread’s existence.

Instead, we cube the loafer and toss with melted butter and bake until they become beautiful crunchy morsels of zucchini bread goodness. Seriously folks, croutons? So good.

The crunchy crouton morsels get tossed into the ice cream at the end of the churn, but first we have to make our base mix.

It seemed only right to add cream cheese to our base emulating a cream cheese frosting. It wasn’t something that my family traditionally topped our zucchini bread with, but it seemed like the right decision for the ice cream. After all, us Broz are all about adding more dairy to our dairy.

The final result is a rich velvety cream cheese ice cream with crunchy zucchini bread croutons.

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 10/26 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!

October 11, 2012

Black Walnut

Here in Minnesota the leaves are starting to fall off the trees, which means that soon the dreaded raking begins. And thanks to our friends at the Minnesota Peach farm in Cold Spring, MN, so does the arduous process of preparing black walnuts for peoples mouths. You thought raking sucked? Try prepping a black walnut for baking and eating. There’s just five easy steps: harvest, hulling, curing, cracking and storage. So easy in fact, that all have their sensitivities and can easily be botched along the way. So why, you might ask, would anyone go through the trouble of harvesting black walnuts? Because black walnuts have this crazy robust flavor that is unlike anything else. It’s what we like to call “unique”. And that’s why we decided to make this weeks flavor: Black Walnut. Let’s get started!

These are processed Black Walnuts from Minnesota Peach. Seriously, if you’ve never had a black walnut before, they have a flavor like no other. They have a rich, buttery earthiness that could be likened to a mushroom, although there is also a blueberry muffin-esk note that complicates the initial flavor blast on your palate. It’s a wild and crazy ride people.

And let us point out, you can’t just run out to your local grocer and purchase these things. These nuts are locally hand harvested and processed.

Getting back to the ice cream…we wanted to make a creamy ice cream that is infused with that unique black walnut flavor, and in the end, that is what we did. The walnuts get a nice roasty toasty in the oven, cooled, and then into the food processor.

The pulverized roasted black walnuts get added into our heated ice cream base for a steeping session. All those crazy nut oils and flavors become one with the ice cream base, and then the nut solids get strained out. Into the mixer and…

There you have it! FrozBroz Black Walnut infused ice cream! A little something Fall to take the edge off after raking those leaves. Locally crafted ice cream made with locally grown, harvested and processed ingredients.

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 on Friday 10/12 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback or else 🙂 . Good luck!

September 27, 2012

Oat Granola with Caramel Apples

The autumnal equinox has now past, so we have officially moved into Fall. The weather outside is showing it too, with twenty and thirty degree temperature fluctuations between night and day. The sun is rising later and setting sooner, which makes us all antsy to get out and get the most out of our days while we can. One of those great fall traditions that I shared with my family was hitting up the local apple orchard for picking, sipping cider, and if we were lucky, chowing a caramel apple. And that’s the inspiration for this weeks FrozBroz flavor: Oat Granola with Caramel Apples. Lets get to it!

My three year old son is crazy for granola and yogurt, which pretty much makes it a morning staple at our house with the addition of some sort of fruit. Fruit and granola go hand in hand, so I thought it would make a nice base flavor for this weeks ice cream.

Our granola is comprised of rolled oats, almonds, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, flax seeds, honey, brown sugar, oil, cinnamon and vanilla.

Everything gets tossed together and baked on a parchment lined baking sheet at a low temperature. It warms the house, and the aroma reeks of Fall.

This granola gets thrown into our brown sugar ice cream base and steeps over night. During the steeping process, the oats, seeds, and nuts break down and soften up releasing their starches into the ice cream base. After the granola gets pressed through a fine mesh strainer, the result is an ice cream base packed with oat starch, making for an ultra rich granola flavored ice cream.

Apples! Hoch Orchard Organic Gala Apples to be precise. I’ve found that I really dig Gala apples when making ice cream. As we always preach, one of our biggest challenges with fruit is getting out moisture content so it’s not icy the creams. Not that Galas aren’t moist, but they have a classic sweet apple flavor and when cooked down or baked, their juices condense with that powerfully sweet apple flavor.

And that’s just what we do with them. The apples get pealed, diced and tossed with a little butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and vanilla. They’re placed on a parchment lined sheet pan and slow roasted in the oven until dehydrated and condensed in to soft apple pillow chunkers. Caramel time!

So we make a traditional caramel starting with just plain sugar and a little water. It gets boiled down until it turns an amber color and starts smoking a bit, at which point we add in our cream, stir, and that’s it! We have caramel!

We pour the hot caramel over our roasted apple chunkers and here’s what you get. Caramel Apple Chunkers! They get tossed into the ice cream at the end of the churn.

The final result is a rich creamy granola flavored ice cream with chewy caramel apple chunks. And that’s the beginning of Fall in a scoop.

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 on Friday 9/28 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback or else 🙂 . Good luck!

September 13, 2012

Pear Mascarpone with Prosciutto and Red Wine Caramel

More local produce is pouring in the doors as the season nears end. And you can pretty much count on all of our Spring and Summer flavors to be inspired by the local produce that is in season in and around Minnesota and Wisconsin. This week, our friend Molly McNeil of Minnesota Peach dropped by with some Luscious Pears, inspiring this weeks flavor, Pear Mascarpone with Prosciutto and Red Wine Caramel. It’s real easy to do, now check it out…

And here they are, Luscious Pears! David Griffin, of Minnesota Peach, is growing a variety of different pears, apples, plums, apricots, peaches, cherries, grapes, as well as a cornucopia of heirloom vegetables on his Cold Spring, MN farm. We were hoping to get our hands on some of his “surprise” plums this year, but unfortunately, warm late winter temperatures brought early budding to his trees, and April frost devastated this year’s crop.

Fortunately, these Luscious Pears, not much bigger than plums, are packed with juicy sweetness…the kind that runs down your face after each bite.

I wanted to try a new technique incorporating the flavor of the pears into the ice cream this week. I wanted to actually flavor the ice cream base with the pears, and as we often talk about, moisture content is always a big issue with fresh fruits. To start with, we core the pears, and toss in the food processor for a little spinneroni.

Next, the puree gets pushed through a fine mesh chinois to extract the pear nectar, leaving the pulp behind.

We added a little sugar to the nectar and reduced it until the sugars concentrated enough so that it would not turn icy in the ice cream.

The nectar reduction along with the Mascarpone, get added into the ice cream base, making for a rich luscious pear base.

I originally had thoughts of using Prosciutto with a plum flavor, but it pairs so well with almost all fruit, that I decided to go with it for this week’s flavor.

The prosciutto gets laid out on parchment, and into the oven to bake. The result are these ultra thin, crispy salty bits of Prosciutto that get tossed into the ice cream at the end of the churn. They soften up a little in the cream, but these little bits are money-in-your-mouth.

And the final component to this week’s flavor jam is a red wine caramel. We start it off making a traditional caramel with sugar and water. After the sugar boils and turns an amber color, we add our Primitivo Italian red wine and reduce until the caramel coats the back of a spoon. Now it’s ready to layer into our pints.

The result is this rich creamy pear ice cream with salty bits of prosciutto and a red wine caramel layered in to blow your mind.

If you’re interested in trying –

Every week, we give two pints away of our new flavor in a random drawing. To enter, leave a comment on our facebook page or, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (9/14/2012) 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 agree to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!

August 30, 2012

Pistachio with Peach Marmalade

Week two of Peach madness here at FrozBroz. Last week we had a record response to our Brown Sugar, Grilled Peach with Cinnamon Syrup, so we thought we’d wrangle another peach flavor into our repertoire for you to drool over. After all, it is still peach season here in the upper Midwest. I decided I wanted to showcase this weeks peaches in a marmalade accompanied by one of peaches best friends, pistachios(FYI, peaches other best friend is ice cream). They make for a great pairing, so let us introduce our Pistachio with Peach Marmalade.

These are organic raw pistachios. Their color is bright as is their flavor. In the past, we’ve always used pistachios as an addition to our ice cream not only to pair with other flavors, but to add texture with crunch from the nut itself. This week I set out to flavor the ice cream with the pistachios themselves. To start with, stacios get tossed in the oven for a little roasty toasty.

When they come out of the oven, they go into the food processor with a little cream, and get pulverized. This pistachio mash gets steeped in our ice cream base and strained out through a fine mesh chinoise.

The base is salted and ready for action.

Oh, and speaking of ready for action. These peaches from Barnard Orchard in Wisconsin are ready for some serious simmer down action.

Peaches get diced and tossed in a sauce pan with sugar, lemon juice and candied ginger. We crush them a bit to release their juices and break up some of the larger chunks.

On the stove top for a simmering. The peaches breakdown, become translucent, and their flavors concentrate.

Peach Marmalade! Golden orange color and ripe peach flavor, this marmalade is ready for your mouth – and our ice cream. We layer it in alternating with our rich creamy pistachio ice cream base.

And the result: FrozBroz Pistachio with Peach Marmalade ice cream!

Want to try some? 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 (8/31/2012) 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 agree to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!