October 2012 – FROZBROZ

October 25, 2012

Cream Cheese Zucchini Bread

Even though we have, for the most part, moved out of the harvest season, there are still flavors that we never had a chance to bring to life. This is due to the fact that when choosing from the enormous array of local fruits and vegetables, we want to showcase our top picks for the season. This week, we wanted to step back and remember one of the “passed by”; Zucchini! It’s one that we passed by in the prime of it’s season, but wasn’t forgotten. Heck, you might even be able to find a few late-harvested zucchini at one of this year’s last Farmers’ Markets this weekend. With that, let’s jam out this week’s flavor: Cream Cheese Zucchini Bread.

Zucchini bread is one of those things that was around a lot when I was a kid. You know how it is in the Midwest during the month of August? Everyone who has a garden is trying to download their monster zucchinis off on everyone else. My mom must have been a taker of many, because it seemed like there was always another in queue.

It’s the Midwesterner’s coffee cake. So I thought, let’s put it in the ice cream.

Using my mom’s age old recipe we started with whole zucchinis and shredded them up. The other standards get added; eggs, sugar, flour, oil, cinnamon and into the oven.

And there you have it – classic zucchini bread! Slice it, butter it and it’s chow time. Only thing, it would become a mushy mess if we added it to our ice cream at this point in the bread’s existence.

Instead, we cube the loafer and toss with melted butter and bake until they become beautiful crunchy morsels of zucchini bread goodness. Seriously folks, croutons? So good.

The crunchy crouton morsels get tossed into the ice cream at the end of the churn, but first we have to make our base mix.

It seemed only right to add cream cheese to our base emulating a cream cheese frosting. It wasn’t something that my family traditionally topped our zucchini bread with, but it seemed like the right decision for the ice cream. After all, us Broz are all about adding more dairy to our dairy.

The final result is a rich velvety cream cheese ice cream with crunchy zucchini bread croutons.

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 10/26 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!

October 18, 2012

Caramel Cinnamon Roll

A few weeks back I made a quick one-off flavor for a family gathering that was the genesis of this idea, using our sour cream base and the cinnamon syrup leftover from our Grilled Peach and Cinnamon Syrup flavor. The combination of the cinnamon, brown sugar and the sour cream base instantly reminded me of a cinnamon roll, and screamed for a treatment similar to the method we used a year ago for the Apple Fritter Apple Fritter flavor. Meaning it was time to hunt down the best cinnamon roll we could find, which wasn’t hard at all.

If you haven’t experienced the bakery utopia that is Michelle Gayer’s Salty Tart at the Midtown market, you are sorely missing out. I made a visit with a cinnamon rolls on the brain, but what I ended up with was nothing short of serendipity.

This is Salty Tart’s caramel roll monkey bread, and I can be completely honest in saying that this is one of the most amazing pieces of food I have EVER had. I’m talking an immediate nuclear powered rocket to the top of my final meal/stranded on a desert island type of sweet roll that knocked me straight out of my keds. I was expecting it to be good. But THIS good? Wow.

Suffice it to say, as long as we didn’t screw this up, we can’t really take credit for how good this ice cream really is because a large part of it has to do with this monkey bread.

What was even better, was the assembly of the small pieces into the final product made for a perfect match to get the maximum flavor out of the steeping process, AND for the glorious chunks that would go into this ice cream. The game plan commenced.

First some of the monkey bread was torn apart and slowly baked off in the oven to make it even more crunchy and help it retain its constitution in the ice cream base. As we’re wont to do.

As the monkey bread morsels were getting their crunch on, we mixed up a sour cream base to best represent the cream cheese icing you would have on a stereo typical cinnamon roll.

We then took the remainder of the monkey bread and steeped it in the warm cream to soak up the starchy, buttery goodness of the bread. This process nets not only an ice cream base that actually tastes a lot like the monkey bread, but the starch from the bread leeches into the cream and makes exceptionally silky.

Then, the cinnamon caramel – I realized in making the first iteration of this that I actually preferred the caramel to be grainy – it provided a little crunch and extra sweetness that I liked, so we cooked the syrup to end up with a grain to it- not usually what you want when making caramel.

For the end product the caramel was swirled in amongst the amazing chunks of crunchy monkey bread, all swimming in a silken monkey bread ice cream.

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 10/12 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!

October 11, 2012

Black Walnut

Here in Minnesota the leaves are starting to fall off the trees, which means that soon the dreaded raking begins. And thanks to our friends at the Minnesota Peach farm in Cold Spring, MN, so does the arduous process of preparing black walnuts for peoples mouths. You thought raking sucked? Try prepping a black walnut for baking and eating. There’s just five easy steps: harvest, hulling, curing, cracking and storage. So easy in fact, that all have their sensitivities and can easily be botched along the way. So why, you might ask, would anyone go through the trouble of harvesting black walnuts? Because black walnuts have this crazy robust flavor that is unlike anything else. It’s what we like to call “unique”. And that’s why we decided to make this weeks flavor: Black Walnut. Let’s get started!

These are processed Black Walnuts from Minnesota Peach. Seriously, if you’ve never had a black walnut before, they have a flavor like no other. They have a rich, buttery earthiness that could be likened to a mushroom, although there is also a blueberry muffin-esk note that complicates the initial flavor blast on your palate. It’s a wild and crazy ride people.

And let us point out, you can’t just run out to your local grocer and purchase these things. These nuts are locally hand harvested and processed.

Getting back to the ice cream…we wanted to make a creamy ice cream that is infused with that unique black walnut flavor, and in the end, that is what we did. The walnuts get a nice roasty toasty in the oven, cooled, and then into the food processor.

The pulverized roasted black walnuts get added into our heated ice cream base for a steeping session. All those crazy nut oils and flavors become one with the ice cream base, and then the nut solids get strained out. Into the mixer and…

There you have it! FrozBroz Black Walnut infused ice cream! A little something Fall to take the edge off after raking those leaves. Locally crafted ice cream made with locally grown, harvested and processed ingredients.

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 10/12 at 4pm. Winners must be able to pick up locally and give us feedback or else 🙂 . Good luck!

October 4, 2012

Fig, Fennel Pollen and Feta

How’s that for alliteration?

A few weeks ago we were brainstorming flavors, and as fate would have it, our friends Molly and Dave from Minnesota Peach called up with some fresh Minnesota grown figs and serendipity did the rest. The pressure always mounts a bit when we get a precious bucket of fruit from Dave’s farm, and for this one we wanted to do something decadent. So we did what we do best – we took one of our favorite bases as of recent – Fennel Pollen, and combined it with the fruit and of course (being proper Midwestern boys) some cheese.

We started with the figs. Molly delivered them perfectly ripe and they went immediately in a pot to be reduced down with sugar and lemon zest to create a rich fig puree.

The figs cooked down like good little minnesota fruits, and we ended up with this luxurious fig jam.

Then it was time for the cheese. We had decided on Feta, but there are so many options. A visit to our favorite Co-op led us to this incredibly french made Sheeps Milk Feta. It is a very creamy Feta and more mild than Spanish or Greek varieties but still retains a nice salty kick.

To prepare it for the ice cream, we froze it first and then chopped it in its frozen state to keep it from crumbling too fine and turning the ice cream into a crumbly mess. We want the chunk to be significant enough to takeover the palate for a brief moment but small enough to not overwhelm the other flavors.

For the base, we used our Fennel Pollen – which we have developed a serious love affair with and will likely be using this for upcoming flavors as a Vanilla might typically be used.

Fennel Pollen before going into the cream.

The fennel pollen ice cream was spun with the Feta going in at the end and the fig jam layered in as the ice cream goes into the pint.

Its good. Its real good. Little chunks of salty and creamy that melt into your mouth while you get bursts of figgy goodness all enveloped by the royal fennel pollen ice cream.

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!