Erik – Page 19 – FROZBROZ

August 16, 2012

Tomato Jam

It’s official, my favorite time of year has come…Tomato Season! I think we can safely say that the sooner we can purchase our produce after it is harvested, the higher it’s quality and flavor will be. That’s just one of many reasons to buy local, but as far as produce is concerned, it’s not always possible here in Minnesota, and some of our alternatives can satisfy those winter cravings. But tomatoes are one of those fruits that are really only good during the local harvest season. I’ve had plenty of “ok” tomatoes during the off season, but this time of year, tomatoes are a gold mine and their flavors are fantastic. As the harvest rolls in, many folks are canning and freezing their tomatoes, so here at FrozBroz we wanted to share another alternative for saving some of this tomato season for the months to come. And in the process put some of that hard work into our ice cream. So let’s get started with this week’s flavor…Tomato Jam!

Roma tomatoes purchased at our lovely Midtown Farmers Market. Check them out when you can, cause the vibes over there be jammin.

If you’ve ever canned tomatoes before, the first thing you have to do is get the skin off.

Hey look, these have the skin off! And to do that, we dropped them in a pot of boiling water for about 30 seconds and then into an ice bath to cool down.

The tomatoes get quartered, then seeds and innards removed.

Into a large sauce pan with sugar, fresh ginger, lemons and cinnamon stick.

We simmer it all down for a few hours until the tomatoes are translucent and almost falling apart, at which point we remove lemons and cinnamon stick and increase heat to reduce moisture content.

The end result is this gorgeous tomato jam. Let us tell you, this can be put on almost anything sweet or savory. Spread it on a crostini with goat cheese and caramelized onions or on your Serrano ham sandwich, OR if you’re us…

Layer it into your ice cream infused with Fennel Pollen. FrozBroz Tomato Jam 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 (8/17/2012) 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 2, 2012

Manhattan Cocktail

This time of year is total bliss for us over here at FrozBroz central headquarters. There are so many fruits and vegetables in season and so many on the horizon that flavor choices come easy. Last week we railed out our Cherry Pit Creme Fraiche with Rainier Cherry and Lemon Thyme, featuring Rainier cherries. It was such a success that it kept me thinking about cherries, which brought to mind one of my favorite supper club cocktails, the Manhattan. I mean, a Manhattan cocktail would be delicious in ice cream, right? And so it became my mission to create the FrozBroz Manhattan Cocktail ice cream. Let us begin!

Sweet cherries! To me, this is where it all begins. I love a classic Manhattan and even an Old Fashion, and a great maraschino cherry can make it all the better. So first things first; have to make a killer cocktail maraschino cherry with these gorgeous Bing cherries.

Cherries get pitted, and tossed in a sauce pan to simmer with sugar, lemon juice, cinnamon stick and almond extract. After a simmer down they come off the heat and we add…

Luxardo maraschino cherry liqueur. Made in Italy, this sauce is made with a distillation process using sour cherries. It packs a ton of flavor, and of course, alcohol, which helps displace the water content in our cherries. This will keep our maraschinos from turning icy in the cream.

The result are these beautiful maraschino cherries that are going to play an integral part to the backbone of our Manhattan. They get chopped up and added into our ice cream base.

And since were talkin backbones, lets not forget about the other crucial ingredients; Angostura bitters, sweet vermouth and orange zest.

Along with our maraschinos, they’re tossed in and working together to make this killer Manhattan ice cream base scream for whiskey.

Canadian whiskey that is. And why not make it a whiskey caramel? Ok, sure, yeah, we will! We simmer out a caramel with sugar, add cream, and lastly our Crown whiskey. The alcohol content in the herskey will lower the freezing temperature of the caramel, allowing it to remain soft in the ice cream. We layer the whiskey caramel into our pints during packaging.

There you have it…FrozBroz Manhattan Cocktail ice cream!

It can be yours.. 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 (8/3/2012) 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!

July 19, 2012

Port Black and Blueberry

Thanks to a fantastic season here in Minnesota, we are still rolling out new berry flavors. This week we’re combining the summer’s newest arrival, blackberries, with the steadily ripening blueberries. To boot, we’re throwing down a little port into the mix to really enhance the berry berriness of these berries.

Hoch Orchard Organic Blackberrries! Hoch, located in the hills of La Crescent, MN, is producing strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, cherries, apricots, plums and apples. You will find a variety of Hoch friuts and berries at your local Coop here in Minneapolis.

These blackberries are sweet, juicy and firm, the way blackberries are suppose to taste.

We were fortunate enough to score these gorgeous blueberries from a family friend’s garden back in our home state of Wisconsin. It didn’t take long to get them off the bush and into our ice cream.

The blackberries and blueberries get smashed up in a sauce pan, along with this port…

Graham Six Grapes port pairs perfectly with these dark berries. It’s bold, robust, and ripe with it’s own deep berry flavors.

They all get simmered down with brown sugar into thick jammy reduction that gets tossed right into the ice cream at the end of the churn. The result…

An intense black and blueberry ice cream with port.
FrozBroz Port Black and Blueberry ice cream!

It can be yours.. 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 (7/20/2012) 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!

July 4, 2012

Orange with Raspberry Honey and Singing Hills Chevre

We are in full on berry season and this week it’s raspberries that are making their yearly ice cream debut. And since the berries are ripening fast, we need to get them while they’re hot and into the ice cream ASAPeronie. We’ve been talking to our friends down at Singing Hills Dairy about using some of their products in our ice cream and it seemed only fitting that this would be the week since chevre and raspberries make for a killer combo. Singing Hills Dairy, located in Nerstrand, MN, is a small 25 acre sustainable goat farm where Lynne Reeck and Kate Wall farm pasture raised goats. Lynne and Kate aren’t just goat farmers, they’re also cheesemakers, turning their high quality goat milk into a variety of plain and flavored chevres and fetas. Check them out, and please support them, Saturdays at the Mill City Farmers Market and Fulton Farmers Market and Sundays at the Kingfield Farmers Market. With that introduction, lets get to work on this week’s flavor: Orange with Raspberry Honey and Singing Hills Chevre.

We are lucky enough to have a few friends that sport quality raspberry patches right here in the city of Minneapolis. These beauties are sweet and plump and ready for your mouth.

As with most fruit and berries, we need to find a way to reduce or displace their moisture content. This week we decided to roast these raskelberries, condensing their flavors into pure raspberry tartness…raspberry bombs!

If you’re one to actually read our blog posts, you’ll know how much we love our Nordeast Nectars honey…liquid gold. We just featured them in last weeks flavor, Salt Bagel with Cream Cheese and Honey.

The Nordeast Nectars raw honey gets mixed together with our roasted raspberries and then layered into our pints during packaging.

Singing Hills Dairy plain Chevre! As we mentioned before, this is one of a few handfuls of artisanal goats milk cheeses they are making. Other chevres they offer include: Herbed, Garlic Pepper, Marinated, Honeyed, Cranberry Walnut, and Pesto Torte. This week we decided to use their plain, and wanted to try something that we’ve never tried before…

Using soft cheeses in the past, we’ve generally incorporated them into the ice cream base. We wanted to try and create pockets of cheese in the ice cream, so we start by scooping out small chunks of chevre onto a parchment lined sheet pan. Into the freezer so chunkersons would individually freeze. These frozen chunks get thrown into the ice cream at the end of the churn, and to our surprise they ended up staying relatively hard in the ice cream. They add a great texture contrast while offering the spectacularly clean tangy flavor of Singing Hills Chevre.

And lets not forget about our base flavor component: Orange! We add the zest of our oranges to our ice cream base which deepens the flavor pairing well with both the raspberries and the chevre.

Oh, it’s on! Berry season in full effect here at FrozBroz. You can see it all happening right here in our Orange with Raspberry Honey and Singing Hills Chevre.

Like 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 (7/6/2012) 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 be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!

June 21, 2012

Strawberry Cabernet with Black Pepper

We just couldn’t resist making another strawberry flavor for the second week in a row. The season is nearing it’s close, but we just had too many ideas that we had to showcase one more for you all. And it was this weeks flavor idea, that like others in the past, started out as something different from how it ended. The truth is, we make a brand spanking new flavor every single week, and sometimes the path to success leads us in different directions than originally conceptualized. It could be a minor change, like this weeks, but it may have a palpable affect on how the flavor hits your taste buds. Our ice cream has many parts working together to make sweet love and money in your mouth. Though one could argue that we couldn’t go wrong with a flavor, given the ingredients that we use, but believe us, there are a number of outcomes with every flavor profile that we choose. This weeks flavor is no different, so lets get to work and work through our Strawberry Cabernet with Black Pepper.

Black Peppercorns! They get ground and added to our ice cream base for a backdrop that brings out spice and pairs charmingly with strawberries.

This week we stopped by Linden Hills Farmers Market to pickup these beauteous strawberries grown at Svihel Farms in Foley, MN. They get cleaned up, halved and into the oven at low temperature for a slow roast.

We haven’t used wine in a flavor since we rolled out our Tarragon Beurre Blanc back in October of last year and it was a great success. No different here. We are not wine experts, and would never claim to be, but this bottle poured out flavors of ripe berries and nicely balanced tannins. But lets not get too caught up in drinking this wine, because it’s about to play an integral part in this flavor. We poured the bottle into a sauce pan with sugar and a bay leaf and began the reduction process.

Simmered down, the Cabernet takes on a syrup like consistency and it’s flavors are condensed and power packed.

And this is where my conceptualized idea started changing. I began this adventure with thoughts of a black pepper ice cream with strawberry chunks and a red wine reduction layered in. After reducing the wine to the consistency and flavor I was looking for, I was left with less than what I’d planned for layering into the pints. Plan B…

Might as well toss roasted strawberries in with the Cabernet reduction. This was a good idea! The red wine reduction brought out flavors in those strawberries that I dream about. Seriously people, it took strawberry flavor to an 11 on a 10 point scale. This fruit bomb gets added into our black pepper base at the end of the churn. The result?…

A rich vibrant red ice cream with a strawberry flavor that I have always wanted in a strawberry ice cream. The strawberries and red wine reduction are working in perfect harmony with the black pepper deepening the field and leaving a satisfying peppery finish. This strawberry ice cream is made for strawberry ice cream lovers. It’s what we like to call “money! in! your! mouth!”

Like 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 (6/22/2012) 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 be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!