Ginger Snap Ground Cherry

A few weeks back we got a nice delivery of ground cherries from our friends at Bossy Acres. Ground cherries are one of those unique fruits that are around once a year and have a flavor like nothing else. For this very reason, we wanted to treat all of our CSI members to the experience of tasting them in ice cream. For our members, they will be receiving a pint of our Buttermilk Ground Cherry this month as part of their share, but per a request from my wife, I decided to use some of the extra ground cherries to make a new flavor for our weekly give-a-way – Ginger Snap Ground Cherry. Let’s get started…

 

 

Ginger SnapsGinger Snap Croutons

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ginger snaps bring back memories of going to my grandmother’s house. She always had a bag in the cupboard and I always sat at the kitchen table eating ginger snaps and milk when I visited…which was often. It’s actually been about that long since I’ve eaten one, so when my wife suggested this flavor, I was happy to purchase that bag of nostalgia. Don’t knock me for buying these pre-made ginger snaps, because they’re exactly what Grams had in her cupboard, and if they were good enough for Grams, then they’re good enough for FrozBroz. The ginger snaps get broken up and tossed into the ice cream at the end of the churn.

Not just any ice cream base though. This is a brown sugar sweetened base with vanilla and touch of plain yogurt, giving it a caramel-esque quality and silky texture. Now for the jam…

 

 

Ground Cherries - Bossy AcresGround CherriesGround Cherry Jam

 

 

 

 

 

This is the real deal…Bossy Acres ground cherries. If you’re not familiar, ground cherries are like a cross between a grape and a tomato. They grow in the same vine-like structure as a tomato plant and develop a similar exterior wrapper as a tomatillo. They’re called ground cherries, because when they are ripe, they fall off the plant to the ground. Their paper wrapper protects the fruit inside. And oh man, the fruit inside is soooooo tasty. But these little guys are a labor of love; not only does it require a lot of time for Bossy Acres to pick pounds and pounds of these things, but it takes us hours and hours to peel and clean pounds and pounds of these things. It’s something you won’t find any other ice cream companies working with. For the ice cream, we simply simmer down the ground cherries with sugar to preserve their flavor. It’s a simple jam that packs a lot of unique flavor. The jam gets layered into the ice cream before packaging.

 

 

Ginger Snap Ground Cherry

 

 

This is it. Not just it. Ginger Snap Ground Cherry! A brown sugar vanilla ice cream layered with ground cherry jam and packed with ginger snap cookie crunch. It’s a request we couldn’t pass up.

Look good? You can be one of two lucky winners of 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. Two winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 9/26/14 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally. Prizes must be claimed by email within one week or we will redistribute. 🙂 Good luck!

 

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Buttermilk Biscuit with Ground Cherry Jam

For those of you who actually read our flavor explorations and how we go about our processes, you likely know that we coin a good ol’ frozbroz flavor brainstorming session as a  “flavor storm”. During one of these recent flavor storming sessions, the topic of buttermilk buscuits came up. It came naturally, as we love playing around with breads, doughs, and of course, extra dairy in our ice cream. So with buttermilk buscuits on the brain, the beginning of a flavor was born. To top it off, we just recenetly broke down a batch of ground cherry jam with fresh ground cherries from the magnificant Bossy Acers. First of all, who doesn’t like buscuits and jam? It turned into a no brainer. I mean, ground cherry jam in ice cream pretty much makes for an automatic 5 stars, but add in the buttermilk buscuits – now we’re elevating this concept to an off the charts scenrio. Let’s get it started with this week’s flavor: Buttermilk Buscuit with Ground Cherry Jam.

 

 

Buttermilk Buscuit DoughButtermilkButtermilk Buscuit Dough

 

 

 

 

 

Buttermilk Buscuit DoughButtermilk BuscuitsButtermilk Buscuits

 

 

 

 

 

We’ve never actually made buttermilk buscuits before, and I am sure that we have a lot to learn, but for first-timers, these buscuits couldn’t have turned out any better for our purposes. After doing a little recipe research, it seemed the proven method was to use a food processor for the job. We found out that the key to great buttermilk buscuits is agitating the dough as little as possible, and the processor allows for that by doing the mixing with just a few pulses. And that’s just what we did…first, pulsing the butter, flour, leveners, and salt. Next, pulsing in our organic buttermilk from Kalona, IA. Then, it’s a gentle pat down of the dough before cutting and baking off in the oven on a sheet pan. That’s it! Buttermilk buscuits! But actually, that’s not it. We’re not done with them yet.

 

 

 

Buttermilk Buscuit Croutons Before BakingButtermilk Buscuit Croutons

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We can’t just throw buscuits into our ice cream. We could, but that’s just not our style. We talk a lot about textures in our ice cream, and although the concept of soft buscuits has potential to be texturally pleasing, we made the decision to make the buscuits crunchy to add contrast. To do this, we cut our buscuits into croutons, toss with a little butter, and into the oven to become condensed, salty, buttermilk buscuit crunchers. Trust us, it was worth the extra effort. These crunchers are tossed in to our organic cane sugar base at the end of the churn.

 

 

 

Ground Cherries from @BossyAcresGround Cherries - PeeledGround Cherry Jam

 

 

 

 

 

And then…these!  Beautiful fresh ground cherries from our local farmers, Bossy Acres. We’ve said it before, and we will most certainly say it again – it is of uttmost impotantance for all of us to support our local farmers. I’m not sure I could explain it any better than the ladies at Bossy Acres, so click HERE for a great explanation of what supporting local means for all of us – our community. Back to the ice cream…Ground Cherries! After the very laborious task of peeling off the outer wrapper of the ground cherries, we mash them, and cook them down with a bit of sugar until we have our jam – liquid gold. The ground cherry jam is layered into the pints during packagaing.

 

 

Buttermilk Biscuit with Ground Cherry Jam

 

 

The result is our rich creamy ice cream packed with crunchy salted buttermilk buscuit croutons all layered with Minnesota-grown ground cherry jam. It’s just another flavor storm concept that’s been elevated to an off the charts scenerio.

 

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 10/11/13 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!

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