September 2012 – FROZBROZ

September 27, 2012

Oat Granola with Caramel Apples

The autumnal equinox has now past, so we have officially moved into Fall. The weather outside is showing it too, with twenty and thirty degree temperature fluctuations between night and day. The sun is rising later and setting sooner, which makes us all antsy to get out and get the most out of our days while we can. One of those great fall traditions that I shared with my family was hitting up the local apple orchard for picking, sipping cider, and if we were lucky, chowing a caramel apple. And that’s the inspiration for this weeks FrozBroz flavor: Oat Granola with Caramel Apples. Lets get to it!

My three year old son is crazy for granola and yogurt, which pretty much makes it a morning staple at our house with the addition of some sort of fruit. Fruit and granola go hand in hand, so I thought it would make a nice base flavor for this weeks ice cream.

Our granola is comprised of rolled oats, almonds, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, flax seeds, honey, brown sugar, oil, cinnamon and vanilla.

Everything gets tossed together and baked on a parchment lined baking sheet at a low temperature. It warms the house, and the aroma reeks of Fall.

This granola gets thrown into our brown sugar ice cream base and steeps over night. During the steeping process, the oats, seeds, and nuts break down and soften up releasing their starches into the ice cream base. After the granola gets pressed through a fine mesh strainer, the result is an ice cream base packed with oat starch, making for an ultra rich granola flavored ice cream.

Apples! Hoch Orchard Organic Gala Apples to be precise. I’ve found that I really dig Gala apples when making ice cream. As we always preach, one of our biggest challenges with fruit is getting out moisture content so it’s not icy the creams. Not that Galas aren’t moist, but they have a classic sweet apple flavor and when cooked down or baked, their juices condense with that powerfully sweet apple flavor.

And that’s just what we do with them. The apples get pealed, diced and tossed with a little butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and vanilla. They’re placed on a parchment lined sheet pan and slow roasted in the oven until dehydrated and condensed in to soft apple pillow chunkers. Caramel time!

So we make a traditional caramel starting with just plain sugar and a little water. It gets boiled down until it turns an amber color and starts smoking a bit, at which point we add in our cream, stir, and that’s it! We have caramel!

We pour the hot caramel over our roasted apple chunkers and here’s what you get. Caramel Apple Chunkers! They get tossed into the ice cream at the end of the churn.

The final result is a rich creamy granola flavored ice cream with chewy caramel apple chunks. And that’s the beginning of Fall in a scoop.

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 on Friday 9/28 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback or else 🙂 . Good luck!

September 20, 2012

Ground Cherry Chevre Charred Vanilla

Ground Cherries have been a late summer staple in my house for years, and seem to be getting more popular every year. They are similar to a tomatillo with makeup and husk, but have a caramal sweetness to them with just a bit of sourness. I love to use them as a pizza topping with speck or prosciutto, but they work great in desserts as well.

For the first attempt at brining them into the ice cream world, I chose to reduce them down into a simple, unaltered jam. The ground cherries were husked (which is a painstaking task for how small they are), pureed, and reduced with organic sugar into a bright yellow jam – the smell of the jam is incredible – a combination of baking bread and caramel – and the taste is very bright, and somewhat honey like, but with a tart edge and a bit of nuttiness gained from the tiny seeds.

To pair with the sweetness of the jam, I went with a Chevre base using Chevre from Donnay farms and comined it with the last of the charred vanilla bean leftover from earlier this summer.

The powdered charred vanilla goes straight into the chevre base and works harmoniously with the tanginess of the chevre. To really make the Ground Cherry Jam sing, I slightly reduced the sugar content of the ice cream base.

At the end, the ground cherry jam was swirled into the base to create a nicely balanced ice cream – dense, tangy chevre flecked with hints of charred vanilla bean, and rippled with a butterscotch like ground cherry jam.

A bright, and incredibly rich nod to the end of summer.

And that’s that. 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 on Friday 9/21 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback or else 🙂 . Good luck!

September 13, 2012

Pear Mascarpone with Prosciutto and Red Wine Caramel

More local produce is pouring in the doors as the season nears end. And you can pretty much count on all of our Spring and Summer flavors to be inspired by the local produce that is in season in and around Minnesota and Wisconsin. This week, our friend Molly McNeil of Minnesota Peach dropped by with some Luscious Pears, inspiring this weeks flavor, Pear Mascarpone with Prosciutto and Red Wine Caramel. It’s real easy to do, now check it out…

And here they are, Luscious Pears! David Griffin, of Minnesota Peach, is growing a variety of different pears, apples, plums, apricots, peaches, cherries, grapes, as well as a cornucopia of heirloom vegetables on his Cold Spring, MN farm. We were hoping to get our hands on some of his “surprise” plums this year, but unfortunately, warm late winter temperatures brought early budding to his trees, and April frost devastated this year’s crop.

Fortunately, these Luscious Pears, not much bigger than plums, are packed with juicy sweetness…the kind that runs down your face after each bite.

I wanted to try a new technique incorporating the flavor of the pears into the ice cream this week. I wanted to actually flavor the ice cream base with the pears, and as we often talk about, moisture content is always a big issue with fresh fruits. To start with, we core the pears, and toss in the food processor for a little spinneroni.

Next, the puree gets pushed through a fine mesh chinois to extract the pear nectar, leaving the pulp behind.

We added a little sugar to the nectar and reduced it until the sugars concentrated enough so that it would not turn icy in the ice cream.

The nectar reduction along with the Mascarpone, get added into the ice cream base, making for a rich luscious pear base.

I originally had thoughts of using Prosciutto with a plum flavor, but it pairs so well with almost all fruit, that I decided to go with it for this week’s flavor.

The prosciutto gets laid out on parchment, and into the oven to bake. The result are these ultra thin, crispy salty bits of Prosciutto that get tossed into the ice cream at the end of the churn. They soften up a little in the cream, but these little bits are money-in-your-mouth.

And the final component to this week’s flavor jam is a red wine caramel. We start it off making a traditional caramel with sugar and water. After the sugar boils and turns an amber color, we add our Primitivo Italian red wine and reduce until the caramel coats the back of a spoon. Now it’s ready to layer into our pints.

The result is this rich creamy pear ice cream with salty bits of prosciutto and a red wine caramel layered in to blow your mind.

If you’re interested in trying –

Every week, we give two pints away of our new flavor in a random drawing. To enter, leave a comment on our facebook page or, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (9/14/2012) 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!

September 6, 2012

Beet Sour Cream Habanero with Chocolate Swirl

We’re nearing the end of the summer harvest which means a scramble to get our hands on all the local produce we can and figure out ways to use it. We’ve been scheming on root vegetables for awhile, and experimented a bit, but this flavor crosses into new territory for us. We stretched our legs, and gave it a hint of spice from one of the hottest peppers you can get your mitts on, and added a nice chocolate ganache swirl for kicks.

Beets are plentiful at the farmers markets, and we picked some up from our neighborhood favorite – (Midtown Farmers Market).

Coincidentally, I happened across a pile of these beautiful habaneros as well. The flavor of the habanero pepper is often overlooked because they are so hot, but if the seeds are removed they can be very tolerable in small amounts. The red pigment and sweetness of the beet, along with the heat of the habanero seemed to be the perfect one-two pair. After all, red means HOT right?

The ice cream was a 3 step process. First, the beets were pureed with a little bit of water to bring the juice out of them.

Damn if that color isn’t gorgeous.

After pureed, we strain out the pulp and reserve the juice to reduce into a syrup.

I think I accidentally discovered a recipe for fake blood in this process. But I digress..

For this flavor, we use our sour cream ice cream base since it pairs so well with beets and pepper everywhere else. While the beet juice cooks down, we take the reserved pulp along with the (1) seeded habanero pepper and steep them in the hot ice cream mix, then strain again at the end. This process allows us to keep the starchy/grainy vegetable out of the end product, but maximize the beet flavor and retain some of the heat of the pepper without making the ice cream an endurance/sanity contest. The heat ends up being incredibly subtle and tolerable even to my 4 year old son. Yes it could certainly be hotter.

Finally, the scratch made chocolate ganache, is added in to the ice cream as a swirl for an extra twist.

There you have it. Beet Sour Cream Habanero with Chocolate Swirl Ice Cream. A beet and habenero infused sour cream ice cream with little ribbons of chocolate ganache. The beet provides a unique earthy sweetness which goes great with the hint of chocolate and ends with a nice bit of heat on the back of your palette.

If you’re interested in trying –

Every week, we give two pints away of our new flavor in a random drawing. To enter, leave a comment on our facebook page or, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (9/7/2012) 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!