September 2014 – FROZBROZ

September 24, 2014

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 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…

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.

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!

September 18, 2014

Barley Malt Quark Apple Jam

Let’s face it folks, we’re clinging to summer with every fingernail we’ve got, but it’s dreamy warmth and bright sun is coming to an end. The reality ahead is the second best transition season midwest has to offer – FALL! (sorry Fall nuts, I’m a Spring guy). Back to football, back to school, back to cool nights and bonfires and gourds! Back to the long sleeves and jeans us midwest folk are truly comfortable wearing. (amiright?) Oh, and lest we forget APPLES! Every year we obsess a little about apples and we don’t plan on changing.

For this week’s flavor we chose to create an apple jam. In the past we’ve typically roasted the apples, but I wanted to try something different. These Hoch Orchard Zestar apples were diced up small, and cooked down with sugar and cinnamon. Making a jam allows us to get enough sugar in to displace the water content of the fruit and keeps the fruit from getting icy. The trick is always to get the water out of the fruit but still retain the flavor.

We’ve been experimenting with using different types of malt in ice cream and for this I wanted to try out this barley malt extract we picked up. This barley malt extract is a lot like molasses – rich, slow, and sweet. It provides a nice malt background flavor to the ice cream and pairs perfectly with the apples.

As a third dimension, we added some Quark cheese from Milton Creamery. Quark is a fresh/unripened cow’s milk cheese. Similar to cream cheese but a bit tangier. Just can’t resist the temptation to pair apples with cheese – they work so well together.

The scoop – a malty, tangy quark ice cream filled with ribbons of apple jam. It’s fall dangit!

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 9/19/14 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!

September 8, 2014

Black Pepper Chevre with Beet Syrup

With the Minnesota harvest rolling in we’ve been trying to give our CSI(Community Supported Ice Cream) members a good mix of ice creams that are representative of our locally grown fruits and vegetables. Last month, one of our offerings was a sour cream beet ice cream with chocolate syrup, of which we ended up with an excess of beet juice. Instead of throwing out that juice, we decided to make a new flavor. I decided to use one of my favorite fall salad combinations – beets and goat cheese, which brings us to this week’s flavor – Black Pepper Chevre with Beet Syrup.

I wanted give the ice cream a little extra kick and add another dimension, and instead of steeping a fresh pepper in the ice cream, as we often do, I decided to use freshly ground black pepper. The black pepper is added into our ice cream base along with some chevre from Stickney Hills Goat Farm in Kimball, MN. This particular cheese worked well in the ice cream, as it is fairly pungent for a spreadable goat cheese. I didn’t want the cream to dilute the cheese’s goatiness, if you catch what I’m saying. The black pepper chevre ice cream base is cooked and cooled before it’s ready for the churn. Not before we make our syrup though…

For the beet ice cream that we made for our CSI members, we used fresh beets. Fresh beets have an earthiness about them that trumps any roasted beet, and we wanted all of that. We peeled, pureed and then strained the beets through a fine mesh strainer. After the strain, we have two things left: beet juice and beet pulp. Both were used in the sour cream beet with chocolate syrup, but this week, I’m only using the juice. The juice is reduced down in a sauce pan with sugar until a syrup consistency is achieved. Magic! Not really, but it’s really friggin good guys. This beet syrup is layered into the black pepper chevre ice cream before packaging.

Bang! Black Pepper Chevre with Beet Syrup. More salad flavors made into ice cream…maybe that should be the FrozBroz tagline ;).

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 9/12/14 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!

September 4, 2014

Roasted Eggplant w/ Parmesan Shortbread

The end of summer is all about utilizing every last bit we can pull out of the earth. Might be via canning, or pickling, or simply making new dishes and finding new ways to eat things. The eggplant idea hit me literally just from seeing them at the farmers market and I thought, why not? Eggplant offer a subtle sweet flavor that I often use in cooking more as a dimensional/flavor component then as a feature item. That subtle sweetness works wonderfully in ice cream, no matter how strange it might sound. But for fun, let’s add some shortbread. Or maybe shortbread with a good parmesan cheese? Now we’re talking.

Lets start with the eggplant – for the ice cream, the eggplant is sliced, roasted off until nicely browned and blended into a smooth puree that is added to the ice cream base before the cooking process. Roasting helps eliminate the water from the eggplant and rounds out its flavor.

Next, the shortbread. We make a regular shortbread with butter, flour, fresh shredded parmesan and a little bit of sugar. It’s cut into cookies, baked off and then chopped up into small bits to add into the ice cream.

Blammo. It sounds a lot more weird than it really is. The roasted eggplant provides the ice cream with a nice undertone paired with an umami crunch from the parmesan shortbread. A great late summer harvest bite of ice cream.

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 9/5/14 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!