Flavors – Page 30

January 24, 2013

Georgia Walnut

The past few weekly flavors have been inspired by delusions of beaches and warmer weather; happy thoughts to escape the harsh reality of our midwestern winter. While my frozen counterpart enjoys a nice warm weather vacation this week, I remain in the Cities, proudly and hatefully enduring sub zero temperatures which will only harden me and make me enjoy 30 degrees for the remainder of the winter so much more (right?).

This flavor represents the true meaning of Nordic endurance: pure indulgence that only a deep winter freeze can truly incite – something to dull the pain of frostbite, lack of sun and society. Specifically important keys to this equation: Chocolate and Booze.

Background: A few years ago my Pops clued me in to one of his favorite new dessert finds, the Georgia Walnut Pie at the Harbor View Cafe in Pepin, Wisconsin. Being the fiend for pecan pie that I am, a new nutty pie treat piqued my interest. The Georgia Walnut pie is an incredibly rich concoction of chocolate, walnuts, cinnamon and butter – a chorus of flavors that will melt the elastic in your socks and cause momentary amnesia. As soon as I had it, I knew it was an ice cream flavor. Add in a last minute improv of bourbon and you’ve suddenly created the perfect company for your January misery. Typically we tell people that our ice cream isn’t meant for large quantities because we don’t cut corners when it comes to sugar and fat. For this week, all bets are off.

To bring this flavor full circle I chose to create a Bourbon Walnut jam of sorts, by slowly reducing crushed walnuts with brown sugar and water until the flavor of the walnuts is infused into a thick – jam like reduction. It looks like a caramel because of the color from the brown sugar, but the sugar is never cooked to a point where it technically caramelizes. What you end up with is Jam.

The bourbon finishes it off to give it a well rounded kick. Or maybe a roundhouse kick. You decide.

The ice cream base is essentially our 3x Chocolate spiced with Cassia Cinnaomon.

The ice cream is churned and the Bourbon Walnut Jam is layered and rippled throughout the pint.

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 1/25 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!

January 17, 2013

Jasmine Citrus Saffron

We flavor storm a ton of ideas for our weekly flavors each month, and many times they get pushed aside for a better one, or just get caught up in the mix of too many ideas. This week, we revisit one of those flavors that we left behind as it breathes life into this cold winter month, and conjures up images of warmth and color. Let’s get started with this weeks flavor: Jasmine Citrus Saffron

There are countless varieties of rice, all of which have their own special flavor and textural characteristics. Steeping rice in our cream works great, as all those unique flavors inundate the cream. We wanted this flavor to feel light and perfumed, so we decided to use Jasmine rice as one of our base components. Jasmine has a natural sweet floral tone to it that seemed fitting to pair with the floral honey-esk flavors of saffron. We par-cooked the jasmine, then steeped in our cream along with the saffron threads, creating the backbone for our ice cream base. The rice gets strained after the steep, and our base is ready for the churn.

It’s citrus season in California and Florida, and in keeping with our theme to stay warm and light, we wanted to make a citrus syrup to layer into our jasmine/saffron base. The oranges, grapefruit, lemon and limes first get zest-ed, then juiced.

The citrus juice, zest and sugar are heated in a sauce pan and steeped. The zest is strained out, and the simple syrup is reduced into a syrup that is similar to honey or maple syrup in consistency. This tart citrus syrup is cooled and layered into the jasmine/saffron ice cream during packaging.

Bang-go! Sweet, creamy and floral jasmine/saffron infused ice cream with a tart citrus syrup. It’s just another flavor that was almost left behind, but now, will give you summer’s warmth during our coldest months of winter.

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 1/18 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!

January 10, 2013

Coconut & Mangosteen Caramel

We’re entering the middle of January when the true doldrums of a Midwestern winter take hold, and you can’t help but dream of a warm paradise somewhere closer to the equator. With no sunny beach in my future for this winter, I get my kicks by enjoying the fruits (no pun intended) of such places to remind me of what I could have. Maybe its a bit sadistic, but I enjoy it. As an aside, in the 90 odd flavors we’ve put up on this blog so far, we have yet to do one friendly to the dairy free and vegan audiences. This marks our first flavor in both of those categories.

I first was introduced to the strange fruit through a short story in one of my college lit classes (the title of which I’ve forgotten) and have always been curious about it. Native to Indonesia and South America, for a long time they were illegal in the U.S. due to fears of harboring Asian fruit fly. You can find them fresh now, but you’ll still have to do some hunting. Since we weren’t able to get our hands on any fresh, we went the canned route (we’re making a caramel with them anyway) and picked them up with our coconut milk at our often lauded haunt – United Noodles.

Again with the little brains. What does this mean?

For this flavor we chose to do a Mangosteen caramel that would be layered into the base and provide a truly tropical version of a coconut caramel.

Hinted with a bit of fresh ginger

The mangosteen was pureed and strained to remove the seeds and fibers, and then combined with the fresh ginger, sugar and boiled down into a nice flowable caramel.

Next, the coconut ice cream. Coconut milk works wondefully for a dairy free/vegan option because it has a high enough fat content to freeze without being icy. With organic cane sugar and some organic vanilla, you’d never know the difference. (As long as you don’t loathe coconut).

Finally after churning the coconut base, the Mangosteen caramel was layered in as the pints were packed.

What we end up with is a deliciously creamy coconut ice cream with a bright, lightly fruity, mangosteen caramel.

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 1/11 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!

January 3, 2013

Maple Maple Swirl

Happy New Year y’all! The holidays are sadly behind us, but alas, a new FrozBroz flavor is right before us. As we’ve mentioned before, we take inspiration for our flavors from just about anything, anyone, anywhere. This week, it was a holiday gift idea from our buds Jill and Derrick Pulvermacher that had the stars aligning for our flavor: Maple Maple Swirl.

It turns out that Derrick’s father, Jerry Pulvermacher, produces a small lot of fantastic maple syrup every year with a few of his buddies in Plain, WI. Jill and Derrick thought it would be nice gift idea if we could create a flavor that featured Jerry’s maple syrup. How could we resist?

The maple syrup hand-off was made and history begins. About ten years ago Jerry and some of his friends started making maple syrup. It was the start of a hobby, and one that was likely a good excuse to have a few beers in the woods with the guys. In their first year they only tapped about 75-80 tress and produced 1-2 gallons just for themselves. The sap was originally cooked over a fire in an open pan. As time went on, demand increased as more people got their lips on their syrup. The guys tapped more and more trees each year, and about 5 years ago, they purchased an evaporator and started bottling and selling. In 2011 they tapped 350 trees and ended up with 160 gallons of syrup. That’s a lot, right? Well, I was pretty shocked to find out that it takes 50 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of maple syrup. You can do the math on that one. In 2012 they tapped 650 trees and only produced 165 gallons of syrup. If you remember, last years winter was mild, and Spring was warm. It’s a true snap shot of how climate change can really effect maple syrup producers. We have our fingers crossed for Jerry and his buddies down in Plain, WI because their maple syrup is liquid gold, and we hope they keep producing for years to come. If you’re in the area, you can find their syrup at local restaurants and cheese shops in and around Wisconsin Dells as well as the Wollersheim Winery.

For the ice cream, we wanted to slap Jerry right in the face with the intense maple flavor of his syrup. We decided we needed to flavor the ice cream base with the syrup, and also, make a reduction to swirl in as a sort of maple syrup caramel. As ice cream makers, the dilemma once again, is making sure that we aren’t adding too much water content to our mix, as the texture will become icy and undesirable.

To avoid that, we once again, boil the syrup down and reduce it to a thick caramel consistency.

The syrups sugars are now condensed enough that it flows off of a spoon more like honey than maple syrup. At this point, we set aside some of the reduction for layering into the pints during packaging, and we reduce the remaining syrup a little more before adding it straight into our ice cream base. The ice cream mix is heavily salted before churning.

The result is a dense salty creamy maple ice cream layered with pockets of reduced Hilltop Sugar Bush Maple Syrup. Cheers, Jerry!

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 1/4 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!

December 27, 2012

Champagne Caramel White Chocolate with Pop Rocks

If you’ve been following us at all over the last couple of years you know we love our seasonal and holiday flaves. What better flavor to preface a New Years celebration than Champagne? We knew a Champagne flavor would require some sort of fizz or pop to be fully realized, and that poses a challenge with ice cream since fizzy drinks don’t translate well frozen for a multitude of reasons. We theorized Pop rocks would be a nice way to add the bubbly effect and we thought making our own would be the only right way to do it. We found out that the homemade version of pop rocks doesn’t quite provide the sizzle we were looking for, so we were forced to turn to store bought Pop Rocks. The end result was absolutely worth it.

Homemade pop rocks are made with baking soda and citric acid crystals in your candy to spur a chemical reaction which in turn creates a fizz.

We took a shot at making our own and were successful in practice, but the end result didn’t have the pop we wanted for the ice cream. Real pop rocks are created by injecting CO2 into the candy at a high pressure and provide a much more dramatic “pop” than the home made version. Since we don’t have the high pressure CO2, we hunted down the original.

Pop Rocks. It still took some finagling to get them to a point where they would survive the ice cream bath without reacting and exploding before the ice cream was finished. The answer was to coat them with chocolate to keep them from going off. To pair with Champagne, we felt white chocolate was the right choice.

We reduced some organic white chocolate bars into a sauce and letting it cool to the point where we could coat the pop rocks entirely, in effect creating a “bark” that looked exactly like the candy cane bark I was used to my mom making as part of the Christmas cookie windfall.

The bark was crushed into small chunks in preparation for being churned into the ice cream.

Next, the ice cream itself. We reduced champagne into a caramel – and used the caramel to sweeten and flavor the ice cream, as well as for a caramel swirl.

Where did we end up? A lightly champagne flavored ice cream rippled with a sweet champagne caramel and full of white chocolate coated pop rocks that sizzle and crack in your mouth.

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 12/19 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!