November 2013 – FROZBROZ

November 28, 2013

Brown Butter Brickle

While we spend all of this time in search of wild flavor combinations and new avenues to explore – once in awhile we run across a classic that slaps us right in the mouth. I come from a family of passionate ice cream lovers, and when they brought up Butter Brickle I knew it had to be done. It instantly reminded me of my childhood, and after doing some research I found it was pretty true – it is very hard to find the flavor on shelves these days. It wouldn’t be ours if we didn’t put a subtle twist on it, so we incorporated our brown butter brown sugar base and made the toffee bits from scratch.

The key to this ice cream flavor is the toffee bits. They can’t be overly chewy or overly crunchy. Ideally, they should have a “tender crunch” and will begin to almost “melt” into the ice cream once they’ve bathed in it for a few days.

Our toffee process is relatively similar to making caramel, except we use butter along with the sugar and water, and cook it to a “hard crack” to get the right texture. Once the mixture hits approximately 298 degrees, it is removed from heat and spread out onto a lined sheet pan to cool.

Once the toffee has had time to cool completely, it is broken up into small chunks, varying in size so the small ones melt into caramelly pockets and the bigger ones provide the crunch. The “brickle” is stored in the freezer until we’re ready to spin the ice cream.

This is where we put our little signature on the flavor, using our brown sugar, brown butter ice cream base. It all gets tossed into the machine for a spin and..

Voila! A brown sugar, brown butter ice cream, full of delicate scratch made toffee bits. FrozBroz Brown Butter Brickle ice cream, just in time for the holidays.
Want to try it? 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 11/29/13 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 21, 2013

Thanksgiving Stuffing

Why not start the holiday season a week early? We’re gonna. Right here. Right now. With Thanksgiving coming next week, we thought we would release this fresh new flavor, so that the two lucky pint winners could maybe, just maybe, pick up their pints for the big feast itself. Pints of what, you’re probably asking? Stuffing. Thanksgiving stuffing…but in ice cream. Whaaaaaaa? That’s right, let us explain this Frozbroz flavor of the week: Thanksgiving stuffing…

This is a flavor we kicked around about a month ago in preparation for the Thanksgiving holiday. We went through a handful of different flavor ideas, trying to decide what to do, until Ben said it; “stuffing”. Yes! For those of you who follow this blog, you know how often we bake some sort of cake, bread, or pastry into croutons and toss them into our ice cream. So the idea of stuffing in ice cream, acually makes a lot of sense. We started by making both cornbread and caraway rye bread croutons. Our process is the same as always; cubed bread tossed with butter, and into the oven for the crunchy finish. We added a bit of brown butter to our ice cream base to bring out the nuttiness of the cornbread and the caraway rye. And to add a slightly chewy texture, we agreed that Medjool dates would not only contrast in texture, but add earthiness. The croutons and dates are added into the ice cream at the end of the churn. The brown butter is added in during the steeping process. That’s right, there’s more!

We’ve never used time in our ice cream, and of course, this seemed like the perfect thyme :). So along with the brown butter, we steep the thyme in our base. This week’s base consists of equal parts organic cane sugar and brown sugar. The thyme is strained out before the churn and celery salt is added. We had to. It kind of sounded perfect.

And not surprisingly, it is kind of perfect. FrozBroz Thanksgiving Stuffing – Thyme-infused ice cream with brown butter and celery salt mixed with medjool dates and cornbread and caraway rye bread croutons. We’re just trying to start this 2013 holiday season off right.

Want to try it? 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 11/22/13 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 14, 2013

Charred Vanilla Greek Yogurt and Muesli

One of the absolute best things to come out of making all of these ice cream flavors, is meeting local purveyors and farmers and relishing the fruits of their hard work. We are very lucky here in the midwest and we’ve made no secret about the joy it brings us to give these important people all of the credit we can, since our ice cream would be nothing without them. This week we’re featuring two of them, because they both deserve attention for their fantastic products.

Our affinity for breakfast flavors is no secret, so when we got our hands on this Seven Sundays Gourmet Muesli it was a given that we were going to make some ice cream with it. Seven Sundays makes some fantastic muesli and we’ve been enjoying to say the least. Greek yogurt and muesli are best friends, and our charred vanilla has nary an enemy. It was hard to go wrong with this one, and indeed it is a winner.

We first played around with oats in ice cream at the beginning of this year with our Oat w/ Maple Brown sugar and quickly found that the texture the starch from the oats provides the ice cream is really second to none in silkiness. The same principal applies with the “Original” muesli from Seven Sundays- except along with the oats are whole grain barley and rye, along with currants, pepitas, flax seeds, raisins, coconut, banana chips and more.

Greek Yogurt was a shoe in choice for our ice cream base, which isn’t a total yogurt base, but has enough yogurt to give it that signature acidity and keep the creaminess of regular cream as well. What makes this even better, is now you can buy Greek-Style Yogurt from Rochdale farms straight from our home state of Wisconsin. It is nothing short of incredible.

We also use our signature charred vanilla in this flavor to give it that vanilla punch that works so harmoniously with these flavor. The based is completed by a full steep of the muesli which brings out the starches we talked about before and takes on some of the flavors of the rest of the spices and flavors of the muesli. Our job is easy. During the churn we sprinkle some extra muesli into the base to provide a little extra texture to the bite.

And there you have it. A wonderfully silky charred vanilla greek yogurt ice cream speckled from a muesli steep and a sprinkle of muesli at the end.

November 7, 2013

Donut with Maple Caramel

We’re no strangers to donuts in our ice cream, which has us always looking for better varieties and shops around town. This week, thanks to our friend Heidi, we found a new shop. Well, new to us at least, although it’s been around since 2008 – SugaRush. Keoni Nguyen, owner of SugaRush, along with his son, are making some of the best classic donuts around, such as the bear claw, long johns, and bismarcks. His dough is nothing but perfection, being sweet, tender and yeasty, while maintaining a light airiness about it. These donuts are destined for our ice cream. And so the pursuit began to deconstruct one of my favorite classics: the maple long john. This week we’re calling it our Donut with Maple Caramel. Shall we?

This is one of SugaRush’s glazed raised donuts. Dear lord these are amazing. They aren’t reinventing the wheel here, but they are making an exceptional dough, which leads to an exceptional donut. You must go try one for yourself. The raised donut is the building block for the maple long john, so for the ice cream, this is our starting point. In order for the donuts to hold up in the ice cream, I decided to make croutons out of these glazers. They’re diced and then baked in the oven until crunchy. The croutons go into the ice cream at the end of the churn.

Next, the “maple glaze”. I made the decision to go with a maple caramel for the glaze portion, because I thought a traditional glaze would disappear in the ice cream. First, our sugar is caramelized, at which time cream is added followed by our maple syrup. The maple syrup thins out the caramel nicely while adding natualy maple flavor to the caramel. The caramel gets layered into the pints during packaging.

Donut with Maple Caramel. Consider this a better variety – a play on the classic maple long john.

Want to try it? 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 11/8/13 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!