Flavors – Page 32

November 15, 2012

Roasted Pecan w/ Pumpkin Caramel

Since we exhausted some of the most traditional Holiday flavors last year, we’re left with the challenge of digging deeper and looking at traditions of other cultures or finding new interpretations of the classics we love. A few years ago I experienced my first pumpkin pecan pie, and had my mind blown. Combine two favorites into one you say? Precisely. However, instead of making an ice cream full of pecan chunks, we chose to make a pecan flavored ice cream and ripple it with pumpkin caramel in hopes the two flavors would work in harmony rather than fight each other for the front seat.

Since we made the black walnut flavor a few weeks back, we’ve been fascinated about ice cream flavors steeped with nuts because the texture and flavors are so intense. The fat of the nut releases and combines with the cream, which brings the nut’s inherent flavor along with it. What you get is an ice cream that tastes exactly like the nut, but without any of the protein actually in the final product. We followed suit for this flavor and chose to make a steeped roasted pecan ice cream that screamed pecan, but with none of the chunks. Yeah, I love the chunks too – but its all about different and new experiences and we’re in love with this process.

First the pumpkin caramel. Step one – roast and puree pumpkin. No canned pumpkin here. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Thanks to a lovely blog we ran across in the past few months, the Vintage Mixer, we found a great recipe for pumpkin caramel and adapted it to work in this flavor. The pureed pumpkin is mixed with nutmeg, ginger, cloves, cinnamon and salt, and reduced with sugar and maple syrup.

We omitted the pumpkin seeds from our version in order to keep the ice cream free of rough terrain. Man its good!

Then we ground the roasted pecans into a powder and steeped them hot in the cream mix. Once they get their full steep on, we strain the chunks out to keep a smooth consistency.

Lastly, the pumpkin caramel is put down in layers as the ice cream goes into the pint.

The end result is a incredibly flavorful ice cream that screams traditional holiday flavors all bundled up into one. The pumpkin jumps out first and then is finished off nicely by a instantly recognizable roasted pecan flavor.

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 11/16 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!

November 8, 2012

Parsnip Graham Cracker

Ok, so we’ve pretty much been making graham cracker ice cream since the beginning of time. For real though, it’s one of the first flavors that we ever made and has serious credibility. As a child, I remember dunking graham crackers in my glass of milk, and sometimes just throwing a bunch of large chunks in a bowl with milk and eating it like cereal. The combo is timeless, and yet we still haven’t introduced you all to our plain graham cracker ice cream. And once again, we won’t this week either, because sometimes we just have to roll with a thought and see what becomes of it. So this week, we’re rocking our graham cracker ice cream infused with a little Fall flare: Parsnip Graham Cracker. Lets jam out…

These are parsnips y’all! Similar to a carrot, but sweeter. Parsnips are usually harvested after the first frost, and can often stay in the ground all winter long if covered with straw. The longer they stay in the ground during cold months, the sweeter they become as their starches turn to sugars.

We are infusing our ice cream with parsnip flavor, so first thing we’re going to do is peel, chop, toss with butter and roast in the oven until they are soft and aromatic.

The roasted parsnips then get thrown into our brown sugar ice cream base to steep overnight. The mixture is strained and then ready for a churn. The brown sugar itself gives the ice cream base a butterscotch quality, but with the addition of the parsnips, their naturally butterscotch-esk flavor makes for a double down.

Now we need to crank out some graham cracker chunkers to add in at the end of the churn.

We have perfected our graham cracker chunkers over the years, so they are crunchy in the ice cream and not soft. We start by crushing whole graham crackers, then adding butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and salt.

The mixture gets pressed into a pan or glass dish and baked in the oven until browned and smelling like ridiculously amazing graham crackers. They’re done.

Graham cracker chunkers all broken up and ready to add into our parsnip ice cream at the end of the churn.

The result is a smooth creamy parsnip ice cream with salty spiced graham cracker chunkers.

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 11/9 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!

November 1, 2012

White Russian

Yes, unfortunately this flavor comes the day after halloween – but apropos nonetheless, in honor of one of our favorite movies The Big Lebowski and those who chose to don the threads of Walter Sobchak, Donny or maybe even the Dude himself as their Halloween costume of choice. If nothing else, this flavor would be perfect for nursing back into working condition those who imbibed in true halloween fashion.

Alcohol is always a tricky one with ice cream because its low freezing temperature messes with the process of the ice cream freezing properly. Conversely, its no fun to make an ice cream based on a drink and not have any alcohol in it. We found a happy middle ground by leaving out the (flavorless) vodka and sticking with a clean cream base and Kahlua as the main alcohol/flavor component.

In order to get it to a point where it was present in the flavor but not wrecking the consistency we chose to use it 2 separate ways. The star would be a caramel (as we are wont to do) made by reducing the Kahlua with sugar into a thick syrup and then thinning it out a bit with some straight Kahlua to get the full flavor with the alcohol.

Once finished with the caramel, we moved onto the base. To represent the cocktail as closely as possible, we went with a straight cream base and used confectioner’s sugar to provide an extra clean sweetness, and added a little more Kahlua to the mix to shine through ever so subtly without ruining the cream’s ability to freeze.

To finish off, a Filbert of course. Since any true White Russian isn’t served without its hazelnut garnish, we threw in a handful of crushed hazelnuts to provide a little crunch and accent to the sweetness of the cream.

The end result was a perfect match – a simple White Russian cocktail flavored ice cream striped with gooey Kahlua caramel and peppered ever so lightly with a filbert garnish.
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 11/2 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 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!