Flavors – Page 12

October 16, 2014

Masala Chai Chocolate Chunk

Sometimes our quest for new flavors and combinations blinds us to what is right in front of us. The idea of Chai and dark chocolate was spur of the moment decision while browsing through tea last week. It seemed like a nice fall, warming (yet obviously cooling) flavor that offered the comfort of simplicity and well, chocolate. I also seem to subconsciously create flavors based on the ingredients ability to provide alliteration in the title. So, I snatched up this Masala Chai mix and grabbed a couple of super dark chocolate bars and was off.

The Masala chai is steeped in our sweet cream base, until infused into the ice cream. The tea is strained out after the hot steep with an ultra fine mesh strainer.

The chocolate I chose for this flavor is a super dark organic chocolate bar from Equal Exchange. It’s broken into jagged pieces and thrown into the ice cream at the end of the churn.

The scoop is a delicately spiced Masala Chai ice cream filled with chunks of dark, dark chocolate. Perfect for a fall night.

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 10/17/14 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!

October 8, 2014

Toasted Oak with Sweetland Orchard Hard Cider Syrup

Grilling/barbecuing is a favorite of ours, in particular, the technique of smoking, which got me thinking about trying to infuse wood flavor into our ice cream. You know, think of that cedar smell when you’re in a sauna. I wanted to get that into the ice cream, but not cedar. In particular, oak. I just wasn’t sure about using any ordinary oak gathered from the woods to put in our ice cream, so I did a little research, and of course, they sell prepared oak chips and shavings at the home brew store for brewing beer and wine. !!! Now that I have my oak, the obvious pairing was wine, but hard ciders are big right now, and tis the season for cider, so I wondered if there were any hard ciders that got aged in an oak barrels. But more importantly, can I find a locally produced cider? And I did, which brings me to this week’s flavor – Toasted Oak with Sweetland Orchard Hard Cider Syrup

I stopped into Northern Brewer and their helpful staff walked me through their wood chip/shaving varieties, and I decided to go with a medium toasted oak chip. I didn’t want to overpower the ice cream, but also didn’t want it to be virtually unrecognizable. My thought was to steep the oak chips in our ice cream base (as we do with pretty much everything) in hopes that I would achieve that toasted oak taste, as it smells, in the actual cream. It worked! And by worked, I mean worked. Basically it worked. Really well. Better than expected. After the steep, the chips get strained out, the base is cooled and is ready for the churn.

Next, cider syrup! First and foremost, I wanted to find a locally produced hard cider, but I was hoping to find one that was fermented in oak barrels. I found this Sweetland Orchards Northern Spy Hard Cider, from Webster, MN, but couldn’t find any info on their fermentation process. The cider itself though was really interesting and delicious. It is a dry cider, and as the bottle suggests, a champagne cider. It was exactly that. It had both cider and champagne qualities, which in my mind, was perfect for this flavor pairing. For the syrup, I reduced the cider down by a half to two thirds to condense flavors, then added sugar to make a syrup. The syrup is swirled into the ice cream before packaging.

The end result is a toasted oak ice cream that is almost caramelly layered with a hard cider syrup AKA apple wine. It’s a unique and delicious combo, and one that you’ll only find here.

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 10/10/14 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!

October 2, 2014

Caramel Apple w/ Crushed Peanut

It’s fall. Its apple season. And I’m stuck in the Apple rut. Really not a bad rut to be stuck in if you ask me. There are so many apple varieties to play around with, there are are tons of flavor possibilities depending on the variety you choose. You can get tart, sweet, crunchy or tender, or a mixed bag. Recently we’ve used Zestar apples, and the latest pickup is an old standby in the apple world- Cortland. I chose to use them this week for a play on my favorite caramel apple – the one coated in crushed peanuts.

This flavor doubles up on both the caramel and the apple components. For the ice cream, we made a caramel base, by cooking a simple caramel with sugar and using that as our sweetener. Makes for a great, caramel flavored cream. In addition, some of the caramel is reserved to swirl into the ice cream at the end.

For the apples, we used a combination of roasted apples, as well as a layer of apple jam as a swirl in with the extra caramel..

At the end, we added crushed salted peanuts, for a good crunch.

The scoop is a rich caramel ice cream filled with tart roasted apples decorated with an apple jam and caramel swirl and finished with crunchy crushed peanuts.

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 10/3/14 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 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!