Flavors – Page 38

April 19, 2012

Pink Peppercorn Rosemary with Candied Grilled Pineapple

This is a flavor solely inspired by our friend Mandy Rismon. Mandy, a fellow food nerd sent us a fantastic recipe she drummed up in her own kitchen, for a riesling poached pineapple w/ rosemary whipped cream and pink peppercorn garnish as an idea for a new flavor.

We loved it and since we have been wanting to rock some pineapple, chose to use her recipe for this weeks flavor. We had to make some minor changes to Mandy’s recipe to make all the elements work with ice cream, but the end result is a total win.

An exciting, but very important sidenote – this is our first week using cream from Pride of Main Street Dairy from Sauk Center, MN. We’re pretty pumped about how awesome it is.

Fresh organic pineapple, straight from Seward Co-op.

First, for the pineapple, we chose to grill it to get some of the water out, and add a little char to the mix.

Don’t worry, we took out the core.

Then, we candied it with a touch of maple syrup to impart a little extra sweetness and get that last bit of water out to ensure there would be no icy. Avoid the ice.

Candy indeed.

We steeped the rosemary to give it a nice background flavor in the cream

Do not disturb…

And to finish, we added some freshly cracked, fruity pink peppercorns straight into the cream during the churn.

Pretty aren’t they?

Last but not least, the pineapple was carefully layered into the pint, so as not to completely overwhelm the subtlety of the rosemary and pink peppercorn. We think it turned out spectacularly.

Here it is. Would you like to see more of this kind of ice cream or be able to buy it online? Then please, help us with our fundraiser on indiegogo, we only have 22 days left and need all the help we can get! And in exchange you’ll be one of the first to get our ice cream. Visit our page at www.indiegogo.com/frozbroz
As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (4/20/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page (or email you if you’re comment resides here). Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck!

April 17, 2012

Sweet and Sour Cream Cheese Wonton – Fan Flavor Contest No. 2

This brings to a close our second “Fan Flavor Contest”. Again, the winner will be stylin in a spanky new FrozBroz T-shirt as well as eating a pint of their suggested flavor. We had a great response and everyone offered an impressive array of flavors, some intriguing and some kinda scary. So thank you to everyone who participated, and congratulations to Adam Arling who was the winner of “Fan Flavor Contest” No. 2 with his flavor suggestion of Sweet and Sour Cream Cheese Wonton.

When we make a flavor, conceptually, there are a number of different routes to take it. For this one, we both immediately knew that making a sweet and sour syrup to layer into the pints was the route for us.

The sweet and sour syrup consists of a reduction of rice vinegar, tomato paste, sugar, pineapple chuckers, and last but not least…Sriracha Chili Sauce. We needed to reduce this mixture into a syrup instead of thickening with cornstarch, so we could evaporate as much of the water content as possible.

After the syrup has reduced and thickened, we strain out the pineapple and tomato solids and we’re left with a nice sweet and sour syrup that doesn’t get icy when frozen in the ice cream.

The wontons presented a challenge – so thin and fragile they’re likely to get soggy in the cream – so we took a double headed approach – some steeped in the cream to add the fried flavor, and others were rolled up before frying and dried in the oven after to get a maximum crunch. Will they hold up in the ice cream? Time will tell, but the wonton flavor is undeniable.

Cream Cheese! We decided to mix this directly into our base . It makes for an ultra rich cheese cakey ice cream, along with all of the starches from steeping the base with fried wontons.

That wraps up or second “Fan Flavor Contest” with Adam’s suggestion of Sweet and Sour Cream Cheese Wonton FrozBroz style. Congrats Adam on the cray cray suggestion.!

UPDATE: 4/23/2012 Feedback from one of our winners…

Four of us tried the Wonton ice cream last night. Three of us enjoyed it; it was a bit too “saucy” for the fourth person’s tastes (she’s sensitive to vinegar flavors).

Here are our comments:
+ The ice cream base is really tasty and creamy. The cream cheese added smoothness to the base; we all felt that this base was exceptional in its texture. The flavor was mild, which was good so that it didn’t “fight” the sauce ribbons.
+ The sauce ribbons provided a good flavor contrast. It was a weird flavor for ice cream, but weird in a good way. We all enjoy funky desserts, so we really got into the fact that there was sweet n’ sour sauce in our ice cream!
+ The crunchy wonton bits added a nice texture contrast, and their flavor was appropriately wonton-y. Personally, these bits were my favorite aspect of the ice cream.
+ The other wonton bits were too mushy; they made it feel like the wonton bits were inconsistent.
+ The blending was inconsistent. Some bites were really strong with loads of sauce, while others were sauce-less. With much of the flavor coming from the sauce, we felt that the end product would be better if the ribbons were thinner and more evenly incorporated.
+ This same group of people tasted your Cardamom Basmati Pistachio ice cream, and we all agreed that we LOVED that one and LIKED this one.

Please don’t forget about our Indiegogo fundraising – we have just under 26 days to go and need all the help we can get! Help us meet our goal so we can start making our ice cream and getting it to all that want it.

http://www.indiegogo.com/frozbroz?a=446076

April 12, 2012

Azuki Red Bean

It’s not very often that we make a flavor with only a one ingredient add-in to our ice cream base. For one, it’s just not challenging enough, and two, it’s kinda boooooring. The reality is, flavors on their own like chocolate, strawberry and vanilla aren’t that boring. According to the International Ice Cream Association, these three flavors fall within the top four most popular ice cream flavors in the world. Sometimes our flavor ideas get too convoluted, and we feel the need to go back to where we started. And that’s just what I did this week. I went back to the root of my idea: Azuki Red Bean Ice Cream; because in the end, it’s another great flavor on it’s own, just like chocolate, strawberry and vanilla.

Want to talk about convoluted? This is one of those flavors I’ve been mulling around in my brain for about two months now. I write it on paper. Look at it. Dream about it. Talk to myself about it. It has consumed me at times, so I put it aside and come back when it feels right.

It’s right now. All by itself. Here we go…

Azuki Beans! Purchased these at Minneapolis’s finest Asian grocery: United Noodles .

They get soaked for 24 hours, rinsed and into a pot of cold water. We bring to a boil and simmered until fully cooked and falling apart.

Fully Cooked Azuki beans get strained and then go back into a sauce pan with sugar and a pinch of salt. This mixture gets cooked down into a sweet paste.

“An” – Sweet bean paste that is widely used in East Asian desserts. It can be eaten as is, stuffed into pastries and about a million other preparations; or in our case, stirred into our ice cream base. It’s texture is coarse, and has a unique fruity/nutty/earthy flavor. When mixed into the base the flavor is reminiscent of a strawberry ice cream.

Another ice cream flavor that’s great on it’s own… FrozBroz Azuki Red Bean Ice Cream

As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (4/13/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page (or email you if you’re comment resides here). Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck! Also – again, please don’t forget about our Indiegogo fundraising – we’ve at the halfway pointdays and need all the help we can get! http://www.indiegogo.com/frozbroz?a=446076

April 5, 2012

Brown Butter Cornbread

Among all of the flavors we’ve made, this remains among the top. We consider it to be one of our banner flavors, and tends to come up anytime we are asked what our favorites are. Since this full recipe has been featured in Metro magazine’s march issue (see the whole process and get the recipe here), I’m not going to spend too much time reiterating it.

I will talk about McCann farm eggs which came our way through our friend Heidi Skoog (of Bastian+Skoog and Serious Jam). These beautiful eggs (which look like they’ve already been colored for Easter) exemplify the reasons why we love working with local farmers and why we think natural and responsible farming is the only way.

The eggs have great flavor, great texture and their color are perfect representations of the importance of raising animals to be happy. All of our ice cream includes eggs, and we were thrilled to have these for this batch.

The ice cream flavor itself was inspired through a southern kick I was on, stemming both from eating experiences I enjoyed with my in-laws in the blue hills of Virginia, as well as some of the great southern cooks like Frank Stitt that I stumbled upon during my obsession with southern cooking. Cornbread is a staple of the south, and I originally made it to pair with smoked pork butt. Turns out, it pairs well with absolutely anything, as cornbread is wont to do.

These crunchy cornbread croutons turn candy-like when suspended in the cream, and sing when accompanied by a little (or maybe a lot) of brown butter. We tend to develop flavors to be very forward, very “in-your-face” and this was one of the first that blazed the trail.

And in this case, as with all of our ice cream, its made with eggs from happy chickens, cream and butter from happy cows, and wait, did we mention happy farmers? All part of the equation.

This flavor is one of a handful that we are offering in the perks on our Indiegogo campaign. It will certainly be one of our mainstay flavors as we begin production. Help us out with a contribution and you be one of the first to ever have it. Or, be a lucky winner in this weeks giveaway and try it that way. Or better yet – BOTH! Please help us keep traffic going to the Indiegogo page- having our fans help us keep the visits to the page helps keep us as a featured project on Indiegogo, which will help us meet our funding goal.

RIGHT HERE! BROWN BUTTER CORNBREAD ICE CREAM!

As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (4/6/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page (or email you if you’re comment resides here). Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck! Also – again, please don’t forget about our Indiegogo fundraising – we’ve at the halfway pointdays and need all the help we can get! http://www.indiegogo.com/frozbroz?a=446076

March 29, 2012

Baklava with Foxy Nutz and Salty Pomegranate Caramel

As we mentioned last week, we’ve been wanting to collaborate with some of our super-talented local food compadres, and last week, we did just that with Sheela Namakkal and her ultra in your face chocolate concoctions. This week, another one of kind talent, Erica Strait of Foxy Falafel brings her genius to our world of craft ice cream. Erica is turning out some of the best Falafel these twin cities have to offer using local and organic ingredients whenever possible; Falafel topped with green tahini, humus and cucumber mint yogurt. Make you thirsty? Wash it down with a cup of her homemade Kombucha. Never had it? You best check her twitter feed(@foxyfalafel) or Facebook page to see when and where you can catch her next at your local farmers market. Look out, because soon Foxy will be mobile with her newly purchased food truck.

Straight, or should I say Strait out of the gate, Erica had a goldmine of ideas, each consisting of multiple components. By the time I had my head wrapped around something, she threw in a couple more. Note to self…I’ll be calling Foxy next time I encounter a creative block. We were able to piece together more than one these ideas and come together as a whole in what FrozBroz calls Baklava with Foxy Nutz and Salty Pomegranate Caramel.

We ended up starting with these walnuts she makes…

I call them Foxy Nutz. They’re baked with egg whites, star anise, sugar, salt and a few other secret spices. The result is everything you want a nut to be; light, sweet, salty and spicy. There is a clean airiness to these nuts that is unprecedented. They’re going in at the end of the churn.

One of Erica’s original thoughts was an orange vanilla baklava, which morphed into the actual flavor of our ice cream base. I loved the idea of a baklava ice cream, but I knew the baked Phyllo wouldn’t hold up in the cream.

So, how do we make this work? I decided to butter up some Phyllo and bake it off in the oven. This can’t be a bad start, right?

Next, I warmed our cream. Tossed in some orange zest, cinnamon stick and cloves. And then, chopped up the baked buttery Phyllo and tossed that into the cream as well for a good ‘ol fashioned steeping. To my satisfaction, the cream absorbed the flavor and starches from the Phyllo, giving the base a baklava-esk flavor and an ultra rich texture. After the steep, we strain out all solids and our base is ready to rock ‘n roll into the mixer.

There were a couple of flavors Foxy threw out that involved pomegranate, and I really wanted to use it, because it’s something I hadn’t considered using in ice cream before. We both agreed that a salty pomegranate caramel would pair nicely with the flavors of the baklava cream base.

To make the caramel, I started with a 100% pure pomegranate juice(seen here) and reduced it down 3-4 times into a concentrate.

The concentrate then gets added to the caramel as it’s boiling down. The caramel gets a good salting, and after it’s cooled, it’s ready for layering into the pints during packaging.

Extremely smooth Baklava base, with sweet and salty spiced walnuts layered with the tartness of the salty pomegranate caramel.

Foxy Frozbroz unite!

Another flavor you can’t find anywhere else: Baklava with Foxy Nutz and Salty Pomegranate Caramel.

Want to try it for yourself?

As we do every week, we’ll be giving away two pints of this flavor. Just leave a comment on our facebook page to be entered into the drawing. If you don’t have a facebook account, leave a comment right here on the blog. We’ll draw two winners on Friday afternoon (3/30/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page (or email you if you’re comment resides here). Our only conditions are you must be able to pick it up here in Minneapolis, and be willing to give us a little feedback that can be shared with everyone else. Good luck! Also – don’t forget about our Indiegogo fundraising – we’ve got 43 days to go and need all the help we can get! http://www.indiegogo.com/frozbroz?a=446076