Small Batch Ice Cream – Page 6

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!

December 27, 2012

Champagne Caramel White Chocolate with Pop Rocks

If you’ve been following us at all over the last couple of years you know we love our seasonal and holiday flaves. What better flavor to preface a New Years celebration than Champagne? We knew a Champagne flavor would require some sort of fizz or pop to be fully realized, and that poses a challenge with ice cream since fizzy drinks don’t translate well frozen for a multitude of reasons. We theorized Pop rocks would be a nice way to add the bubbly effect and we thought making our own would be the only right way to do it. We found out that the homemade version of pop rocks doesn’t quite provide the sizzle we were looking for, so we were forced to turn to store bought Pop Rocks. The end result was absolutely worth it.

Homemade pop rocks are made with baking soda and citric acid crystals in your candy to spur a chemical reaction which in turn creates a fizz.

We took a shot at making our own and were successful in practice, but the end result didn’t have the pop we wanted for the ice cream. Real pop rocks are created by injecting CO2 into the candy at a high pressure and provide a much more dramatic “pop” than the home made version. Since we don’t have the high pressure CO2, we hunted down the original.

Pop Rocks. It still took some finagling to get them to a point where they would survive the ice cream bath without reacting and exploding before the ice cream was finished. The answer was to coat them with chocolate to keep them from going off. To pair with Champagne, we felt white chocolate was the right choice.

We reduced some organic white chocolate bars into a sauce and letting it cool to the point where we could coat the pop rocks entirely, in effect creating a “bark” that looked exactly like the candy cane bark I was used to my mom making as part of the Christmas cookie windfall.

The bark was crushed into small chunks in preparation for being churned into the ice cream.

Next, the ice cream itself. We reduced champagne into a caramel – and used the caramel to sweeten and flavor the ice cream, as well as for a caramel swirl.

Where did we end up? A lightly champagne flavored ice cream rippled with a sweet champagne caramel and full of white chocolate coated pop rocks that sizzle and crack in your mouth.

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 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 13, 2012

Cardamom Fruitcake

Fruit Cake is constantly the butt of holiday gift giving jokes. For years I heard about how supposedly terrible they were and had imagined this loaf to be some concoction of olives, yeast, nuts, dirt, grapes and cement. The truth is a well made fruit cake is pretty darn good and we thought it would be more than appropriate for a holiday flavor. Fortunately for us, we found out about these amazing “Not Your Average” fruitcakes from Sun Street Breads and jumped at the chance to use them in a flavor.

These babies are chock full of almonds, figs, crystallized ginger, candied orange peel, bittersweet chocolate and are soaked in rum and aged for at least a month.

Seriously, are you on board yet? They are dense, rich and absolutely wonderful in every sense of the word. I for one, would be thrilled if one of these showed up in a package for me.

For the ice cream we chose to use the fruit cake as-is – chopped up into smaller chunks. It is so rich and dense with rum and sugar that we felt it would hold up in the ice cream perfectly without any extra help, and it did that to say the least.

We chose to pair it with a cardamom ice cream – one of our favorite spices that makes its presence most known around the holidays, especially in the desserts and cookies from our Norwegian heritage. The cream is steeped with fresh ground cardamom while the mix is hot to infuse the cream with the bright, fruity flavor cardamom is known for.

To finish the fruitcake pieces are tossed into the cream mix while spinning in the maker.

The result is a bright, cardamom spiced ice cream decorated with dense chunks of fruit cake that give you a variety of nutty, fruity and chocolate-y bites, with the rum of the cake humming softly in the background all the while .

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 12/14 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!