January 2012 – FROZBROZ

January 26, 2012

Chicory Belgian Waffle

This flavor in particular was inspired by a good friend of ours, Chef Karla Schmitt who gave us our first opportunity to bring our ice cream (in its very early stages) to the public.

In one of our first meetings with Karla, she explained a dessert she hoped to serve revolving around Beignets and Chicory. The original idea was to serve the famous New Orleans pastry with a Chicory ice cream. Her fantastic idea led us down the path to discovering Chicory as one of our favorite ice cream flavors.

Chicory is better known for its close relatives more famous to most people as Belgian Endive, Radicchio – two favorites across the globe for salads, grilling, and braising. The Chicory we use for our ice cream is root chicory used most commonly when roasted and ground to be a coffee substitute.

In this case, we’ve found a French Chicory that has a great complex chicory flavor and is available as an extract – perfect for incorporating into our base.

It is coffee like in its flavor – but claims more of a bold cocoa and caramel flavor that is has a fantastic depth which works amazingly well for ice cream. For this particular idea, we took Karla’s dessert plate and combined it into a single ice cream, substituting Beignets for Belgian waffles.

Who doesn’t like waffles?

The trick with this flavor is similar to many of the former we’ve posted and developed – waffles in their original state are too frail and contain too much moisture to hold up in an ice cream base.

So as you’ve seen us do before – we dice the waffles into small cubes, and bake them off to provide a crunchy waffle like crouton that holds up and retains its texture while retaining the honest waffle flavor.

Add waffle bits, and that is that. A deeply complex coffee caramel ice cream studded with crunchy bits of Belgian waffle.

Time for breakfast!
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 (1/27/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. 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!

January 19, 2012

Green Tea with Orange Shortbread Bars

Winter in Minnesota this year has brought us milder than usual temperatures, but this week is a different story. Winter is finally showing face and with the temperatures falling, what better way to celebrate than with some FrozBroz ice cream. This cold weather got us thinking about hot beverages, and in particular, hot tea. With all of the herbal teas out there, we decided to start with a classic in the ice cream world, and add a little orange twist.

This is Matcha Green Tea from the Tea Source in St. Paul. They provide the Twin Cities with the highest quality teas from around the world. Matcha is a Japanese ceremonial tea which has very complex vegetal qualities to it, which in our minds makes it great for ice cream.

The leaves of Matcha are ground into a silky powder.

We steep this Matcha powder in hot cream, and although we can not be sure, we believe that most other ice cream makers making green tea ice cream skip this step. Instead they incorporate the powder directly into the base. Remember those complex vegetal notes? Steeping brings those out BIG TIME!

And here’s the orange twist! Citrus is in season, so we decided to rock these orange shortbread bars, made with butter, flour, sugar, orange and orange zest. They offer a great balance to the herbalness of the tea ice cream. The acidity of these bars cuts right through.

Come celebrate Winter with us and have a little Green Tea with Orange Shortbread Bars.

How about a free pint? 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 (1/20/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. 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!

January 12, 2012

Cardamom Basmati Pistachio

Sometimes the path to finding a successful new flavor hits several dead ends before we find the way. Often, we’re on a path such as this because we are trying to replicate the flavor of something in ice cream, and that flavor has components that don’t work exactly right when their medium is changed.

In this case, the inspiration for the flavor came from the Indian rice pudding known as Kheer, and if you’ve ever been to an Indian restaurant, you’ve probably tried it. It seems so simple and pure, but the subtle flavors in it can be deep and complex – and any one of them can easily overwhelm the other. Finding the balance can be tricky.

The ever so slightly nutty flavor of the Basmati is hugely important to get the dessert to taste right, but it has no place in ice cream. In my first attempt at this, I thought perhaps the cooked and saturated rice would be o.k. in it’s frozen state. And while it wasn’t offensive, it just wasn’t right.

The trick in this case, was to steep the base with the basmati, long enough to infuse it with the flavor of the rice, without it being a component in the final product.

To achieve the flavor we wanted, the cream and rice go through a two stage steeping process over the course of 48 hours.

Interestingly enough, we also found out that too much Cardamom (which isn’t much at all) overwhelms everything and makes the cream taste like Fruit Loops. It was thoroughly confusing, and somewhat amusing. But totally wrong.

The best outcome of flavor included using a very small amount of Cardamom, and a tiny bit of Saffron. Or maybe just enough to make for a better picture than powdered Cardamom.

The highlight this cream is the pistachios, perhaps my favorite ice cream ingredient of all. In traditional Indian Kheer, pistachios are typically a garnish, mostly an afterthought.

An afterthought? Hardly.

The Pistachios are shelled and crushed into small pieces, and perforate the spice and cream in salty bliss.

‘Stachio.

The flavors come together to be very representative of Kheer, but steer the outcome in a direction that favors ice cream just a bit better. We’ve learned over the years that subtle flavors disappear in ice cream too easily, particularly because cold temperatures dull your ability to taste. Finding a way to intensify subtlety is totally ironic, and feels kind of misguided….. but it can pay off in spades. And it sure is fun.

How about a free pint? 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 (1/13/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. 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!

January 5, 2012

Grasshopper Chocolate Chunk

The holidays have passed, and so we move on to a new year filled with more lost promises of better eating. Well, maybe they’re not lost. Who ever said you needed to pound 15 Christmas cookies a day for 2 weeks straight? It’s just time to regulate our intake.

For most of us, there are still a ton of leftovers, and with leftovers, there are the great memories of last year. One of those great memories at our family’s house is grasshopper ice cream, and unless my brother overstayed his welcome, there will likely be a few more scoops left in the freeze.

So lets do it…FrozBroz style – Grasshopper Chocolate Chunk

What is grasshopper? As a cocktail, it is a mix of Creme de Menthe, Creme de Cacao and fresh cream shaken up on the rocks and then strained into a glass. So we’re pretty much making a cocktail ice cream. Bye bye new years resolution number 3.

This is Creme de Menthe. It is what makes a grasshopper a grasshopper…and green. It traditionally gets it’s color from the mint leaves used to flavor the liqueur. It will clean your sinuses and warm your heart. Along with the chocolate liqueur/Creme de Cacao, we add them both to our vanilla base at the end of churning.

Meet Theo. Theo is the only Organic Fair Trade Chocolate maker in the US. We love organic and we love Fair Trade. This 70% cacao bar is rich with deep chocolate flavor. It gets broken into chunks and added in with the liqueurs at the end of the churn.

Just another lost promise to keep the memories alive. Grasshopper Chocolate Chunk.

Like to win a free pint? Per the weekly drill, 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 (1/6/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. 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!