Twin Cities Craft Ice Cream – Page 5

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!

June 7, 2012

Peanut Butter and Spicy Coconut Curry

Up until now, we haven’t really discussed what makes a quality ice cream in the marketplace. There are obviously many factors that play into an ice creams’ overall quality, but as far as Federal standards are concerned we are talking about the amount of milkfat in the ice cream, and the amount of overrun. Overrun is the volume of air that is incorporated into the ice cream, and Federal standards allow for as little as 10% milkfat and as much as 100% overrun, meaning half of your ice cream is ice cream and the other half is air. This is standard practice for many commercial ice creams in our stores and why we see such a huge discrepancy in prices. There are differing designations for qualities, with the highest being “super premium”, which means milkfat content is somewhere between 14-16% and overrun is 25% or less. Super premium is where our product resides and always will. If there was an Ultra super premium designation, we would be in it, because our ice cream has high milkfat content and overrun of less than 25%. Next time you’re at the store, pick up a few differently priced pints and notice that some are heavier than others. When it comes to ice cream, typically the heavier the pint, the higher the quality. With our low overrun ice cream comes a texture difference as well. It is rich, creamy and more dense, which means it takes longer to breakdown in your mouth. And that’s good because you have longer to savor the flavor. So why are we bringing up this topic of quality now? Well, partly because we go to great lengths, (including controlling the pasteurization process) to make the highest quality ice cream possible. Second, as a consumer, the more you know the better right? Third, and most importantly, this weeks flavor is the epitome of quality in terms of low overrun. So lets get started…

This is peanut buttery goodness, and it was ground fresh from whole peanuts over at the Seward Coop just hours before hitting the creams. I mean, how cool is it to step up to a machine that is full of peanuts, press a button, and out squirts beautiful peanut butter? Maybe not that cool if you have a peanut allergy, but hey, it’s just a fantastic thing for peanut butter lovers. That’s us. The peanut butter gets whisked into the cream while we heat it up along with…

Coconut! As we do with our Seven Layer Bar ice cream, we toast the coconut before steeping it in our cream, which really intensifies the coconut flavors and infuses it into our base.

Mmmmmm, coconut milk. What would a curry be without coconut milk? Have you ever seen this brand before? You can get this and about five other brands you’ve never seen before over at United Noodles in Minneapolis. Please go there. If not for the largest selection of Asian grocery items from 15 different counties, then at least check out their new Deli(Unideli) for lunch. Either way, you won’t be disappointed.

The coconut milk gets added into the cream with the peanut butter and toasted coconut.

Ok, so this is where it gets interesting. When we order Thai food, we generally hit up True Thai. In our opinions, it’s some of the best Thai food Minneapolis has to offer, and it’s one of our neighborhood faves. This weeks flavor draws all inspiration from True Thai’s Rama Spinach Curry with Roasted Peanuts dish,

which incorporates a red curry paste, like this one, with peanuts and coconut milk. It’s served with rice, steamed spinach and bean sprouts. Fantastic! The idea just seemed like it would work in ice cream.

This particular red curry paste is made with chilies, lemongrass, shallots, kafir lime, galangal and spices (coriander, cumin, and cardamom). We stir it in with all the others during heating/steeping.

After our base is heated and all ingredients are steeped, we strain it through a fine mesh strainer to achieve an ultra smooth base ready for the churn.

Peanut Butter and Spicy Coconut Curry ice cream. The viscosity of the peanut butter gave our ice cream makers a workout and by the end of the churn appeared to have virtually 0% overrun, making for uber richness. This weeks pints really do out weigh the competition!

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 (6/8/2012) 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!

May 24, 2012

Bahārāt

One of my favorite cookbooks is “A Mediterranean Feast” by Clifford A. Wright. The book brings together the historical and culinary histories of all the diverse cuisines found in the Mediterranean. It is in this book that I was first introduced to bahārāt. Bahārāt means “spice” in Arabic, and is derived from the word bahār, which means “pepper”, so it is usually a spice blend containing pepper. In the Middle East, bahārāt is used in many savory dishes, and up until now, that is what I have used it for as well. The blend that I generally use contains pepper, allspice, cinnamon and ginger. Just reading that ingredient list could have anyone thinking it’s going into a sweet dish, but a pinch or two in your lamb burgers…mind blowing and life changing. This is of course why I started thinking that bahārāt could make a killer ice cream. It has both sweet and savory aspects, and oh, not to mention mind blowing attributes. And since bahārāt is a spice blend, the list of spices span a wide range depending on the origin of the dish. So lets get to work…

Here are the players in the bahārāt that we’ve blended specifically for FrozBroz Craft Ice Cream. We always use whole spices whenever possible and if you must know, all of these came from Penzeys Spices. Penzeys is as local as it gets for a spice store in Minneapolis, with their origins coming from the Broz home state of Wisconsin. In the picture, let’s move left to right and start with the proverbial Cinnamon sticks, followed by Nutmeg, Allspice, Cloves, Coriander, Peppercorn mix, and in the middle, Cardamom.

Spice party! Let’s grind!

This party is grinding down. Bahārāt is now ready to be tossed into our ice cream base and churned.

FrozBroz Bahārāt Ice Cream! The explosion of spice hits immediately and continues to unfold as the ice cream melts in your mouth.

Would you 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 (5/25/2012) 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!