FrozBroz Craft Ice Cream – Page 3

April 4, 2013

Roasted Banana w/ Rum Mango Syrup

We’ve been on a tropical kick since January, and with the winter clinging to life with its cold dead hands, we’ve got no reason to stop now. The basis of this flavor began with a beautiful ripe Kent mango that called my name at on a recent grocery run.

I nabbed it up knowing I wanted to use it as an element for a flavor, hoping it would conjure a few ideas while it ripened just a bit further on the kitchen shelf.

Conjure it did, and as soon as I saw this little bottle of dark rum in the cabinet I knew it was going to be combined with the mango to make a syrup for the ice cream.

The only question remaining: what kind of ice cream this was going to swirl into? My answer came when I noticed these two slightly overripe bananas hanging in the fruit basket.

We used bananas a few weeks back for the first time, though we’ve been discussing them for well over a year. They make an amazing companion for rum and mangoes.

These two were roasted in a pan with some butter to caramelize the sugars and intensify the banana flavor.

The bananas were pureed with cream and steeped in the organic cane sugar ice cream base to infuse the roasty banana flavor through and through.

Last but not least, this beautiful rum mango syrup is swirled into the pint as the ice cream is packed in.

What we end up with is a silky smooth roasted banana ice cream, swirled with bright yellow ribbons of rum mango syrup.

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 4/5 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!

March 21, 2013

Irish Soda

OK fine – so we’re a little late to the St. Patrick’s Day parade, but this flavor was dreamt up in the spirit of the green day of drinking, and we’re going to post it anyway. We’ve been scheming beer flavors quite a bit over the last few months and released one of our first a few weeks back with the Brown Ale and Bacon Marmalade ice cream. The original plan for this pint of ice cream was an irish drink using a Guinness base, but the rest of the ingredients ended up changing at the last minute, a decision possibly influenced by a pint (or two) of Guinness.

While preparing a meal of Corned Beef and Cabbage for ourselves and the rest of the Froz family oe’r the weekend, we snacked on this wonderful Irish soda bread along with some Irish cheddar from the Seward Co-op. Actually, I should rephrase that for factual accuracy -“while Erik prepared a fantastic irish meal of Corned Beef and Cabbage for the rest of us”….anyway, back to the story.

We enjoyed the soda bread so much, we decided to lay waste to the orignal plans and make it a co-star of this week’s flavor with the Guinness base.

Like we’ve done many many times before, we cube the soda bread, toss it in butter and sugar, and bake it into crunchy little croutons to add the textural element to the ice cream. It’s like having an ice cream cone built in, except this ice cream cone is made of Irish Soda bread and tastes really good.

The base of the ice cream was none other than everyone’s favorite Irish stout. To flavor the ice cream we reduce the beer down with some sugar and create an extract of sorts, then mix it in to our standard ice cream base.

Magically delicious. A malty Guinness ice cream studded with crunchy bits of irish soda bread. We call it Irish Soda.
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 3/22 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!

March 14, 2013

Coconut Bar Banana Caramel

Ok, so it’s March here in Minnesota and this is where the winter starts really dragging arrss. Fortunately, at the end of January I was able to break up the monotony of winter on a family trip to Mexico. It was there

that my sister-in-law purchased one of these coconut bars from the local grocery. I love coconut, so this bar was absolutely aaamaaazing! It’s ingredients: coconut, sweetened condensed milk, and sugar. Simple. Don’t ask what the pink stuff is on top, but the bar itself, is basically a bar version of a macaroon. The coconut is ground, so the texture ends up being chewy and much less course than a macaroon. It’s everything a coconut lover wants their coconut to be. And this is just the inspiration needed for this weeks flavor: Coconut Bar Banana Caramel. Lets do this…

In keeping with the simplicity of the original coconut bar, we stuck with plain unsweetened coconut and sweetened condensed milk. They both get pulverized in the food processor.

Next, the coconut mixture is pressed into a glass baking dish lined with parchment and baked at a low temperature. Once out of the oven, we puree lime zest and cane sugar in the food processor. The lime sugar is sprinkled over the top of the bars and brûléed with a torch. These bars? These ones are good. Really good! They get chopped up and added into our plain sugar cane ice cream base. Did I mention that we’re gonna add a banana caramel to this thing? Well, we are.

Time to work on the banana caramel. Yes, the banana pictured above doesn’t look that appealing, but it has more flavor than any good-looking banana I’ve ever tasted. It’s actually an overly ripe banana that has been preserved in the freezer. I throw all of our over-ripe bananas in the freeze and they are fantastic for smoothies, banana bread, or any other baking recipe. The bananas get sliced, placed on parchment, and slowly roasted in a low heat oven.

When they come out, we’re left with beautiful caramelized bananas that have lost much of their moisture content, but have retained all of their natural sugars and flavor. We make a traditional caramel by boiling granulated sugar. The caramel is finished with cream, and the bananas are added in after getting mashed, making for banana caramel ridiculousness. It’s just a lovely caramel. Banana caramel. Hot! It gets layered into the pints during packaging.

And here it is! Coconut Bar Banana Caramel! Just enough to make you forget that it’s STILL winter here in Minnesota, and enough to have you start thinking about eating ice cream dripping down your face in the months to come.

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 3/15 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!

March 7, 2013

Caramel Popcorn Candied Almond

Its been awhile since we’ve done a collaboration, so we’re excited to be back at it with none other than Twin Cities fantastic Stephanie Meyer. When she isn’t running her spectacular blog Fresh Tart, she’s writing for Andrew Zimmern’s Kitchen Adventures on FoodandWine.com, contributing to Minneosta Monthly, and can generally be found somewhere around town, cooking, taking photos, writing, dining or all of the above. Let’s just say she’s scrubbed laziness from the Thesaurus. Anyway, we met a few years back and our mutual passion for all things food quickly had us scheming on flavors. Talks of collaboration on a flavor followed, so I asked Steph to send us some of her current favorite flavors or ingredients as a catalyst for this collab. An email returned to my inbox with the following:

Popcorn

Almonds

Caramel

Brown Butter

There were more potential flavors on this list, but these were the only ones that I saw. Translation: Poppycock! At least that’s how I first imagined it – popcorn (awesome) and nuts (even better) all covered in caramel and/or toffee (party). We were going to hearken back to one of our first flavors on this blog -Brown Butter Popcorn – and make a Poppycock version of it. Time to make some ice cream.

First. The popcorn. Popcorn is a mutual staple in Steph’s and our households and we’re both fans of flavoring it with brown butter. It was an obvious choice as the main elements of the ice cream base.

The first step in making this particular base is taking fresh pan popped pop corn, not microwave popcorn, or air popped, but popped old school in a pot with hot oil. Why? Because you get the most natural, classic popcorn flavor from the oil cooking the corn over heat. Microwave popcorn is totally out of the question for many reasons, (no thanks butter “flavor”) and airpopped just won’t provide enough oomph. Once it’s popped, we pulverized it in a blender and then mixed into the base and steeped to extract as much of the flavor into the cream as possible.

While the base is heating/steeping, brown butter is whisked in. The brown butter is such an incredible flavor on its own, and combined with salt makes the popped corn flavor much more prevalent, which is exactly what we want.

Boiling sugar.

For this flavor we’re sticking with a classic caramel – with plenty of salt.

We chose to candy the almonds whole, since the true prize of poppycock is the toffee coated nuts. The caramel is swirled into the brown butter popcorn base and the nuts are peppered throughout.

The moral of the story? Ice Cream is just as right for a cold, snowy night in March as it is a warm dusk in late June. Popcorn, Brown Butter, Almonds, Caramel mean victory. This one is a champ. A buttery, popcorn infused ice cream with heaps of whole, candied almonds and ribbons of salty, gooey caramel.

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 3/8 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!

February 28, 2013

Brown Ale with Bacon Marmalade

Ok, so for evers ago, we talked about making a beer ice cream, and actually, I made a single attempt the week before starting this blog two years ago. At the time, we would have been one of the first to produce such a product, but in the end, it didn’t work out. The flavors weren’t there, the texture was icy, and sadly, our desire to continue the fight was diluted by hundreds of other flavor ideas. This week, the fight is on, and this time, we gonna win this one. Also, we’re going to add bacon. Let’s get started with this weeks flavor: Brown Ale with Bacon Marmalade

Raise your hand if you’ve had this beer? Now, if your hand is down, go get one. This is the Lost Trout Brown Ale from Third Street Brewhouse out of Cold Spring, MN…by far the best brown ale that I have had in a long time. Brown Ales tend to be sweet and syrupy for me, but this one is crisp, clean with a slightly bitter caramel finish. For the ice cream, the brown ale is reduced into a syrup and mixed into our organic cane sugar ice cream base. This ice cream alone is versatile for a number of pairings, but this week, I went back through my notes and found a recipe that was screaming for this one – Bacon Maramalade

This bacon marmalade is rich, sweet and acidic. It’s main components: Lorentz uncured bacon from Canon Falls, MN, bourbon, fennel and coffee.

The bacon in chopped and rendered until crisp. The fennel is diced and simmered in renderings until translucent. The bacon fat is drained, and the bacon, fennel bourbon and coffee go into a sauce pan along with brown sugar, maple syrup and cider vinegar. The mix is simmered down for about an hour until the liquid has reduced to a very light syrupy consistency.

The mix goes into the food processor and is pulsed until a marmalade-esk texture is achieved. Talkin versatile? This bacon marmalade can be spread on toast, your burger, pizza, on top of your 85% cocoa chocolate bar. Seriously. No, seriously. But we decided to layer it into our brown ale ice cream.

Boom! Brown ale ice cream with bacon marmalade. It’s rich, creamy and tangy. The flavors and textures are all there, and now we have conquered our first beer cream. Stay tuned, this could be the start of our next obsession.

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 3/1 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!