Flavors – Page 39

March 28, 2012

Apricot Parmesan – Fan Flavor Contest No. 1

Well, our first ever “Fan Flavor Contest”, is in the books. The winner got a stylin’ FrozBroz T-shirt, but more importantly we made a batch of their flavor and gave them a pint of it. Another lucky fan gets a pint as well. Based on the number of suggestions we got, we would have to say, it was a success. Thanks to all who made suggestions – they were all fantastic ideas. Stay tuned to our Facebook and Twitter pages as we will be announcing more contests in the weeks and months to come. It was really great to see our fans’ creative minds at work. A big congratulations to Ann Harste who was our first ever winner with her suggestion of Apricot Parmesan.

Let’s get to work…

From the beginning we had thoughts of apricot marmalade. We just weren’t sure if we wanted to layer the marmalade in, or mix it right into our ice cream base. Either way, marmalade it was.

These are beautiful Turkish apricots purchased at our favorite Seward Coop.

To get the marmalade going, we diced them up, covered with water and brought them to a simmer.

After simmering for awhile, we added sugar and continued simmering until we ended up with…

Apricot marmalade!

This is gold. The depth of flavor here is intensely apricot, as one might expect. In the end, we decided to mix the marmalade into the base, and layer into the pints as well. Double bonus!

Having Wisconsin in our blood, we’ve incorporated a variety of cheeses into many of our flavors, including Parmesan. In our Olive Oil Parmesan ice cream we finely grated the cheese so that it would almost disappear in the base. For this flavor, we wanted to get a nice shaving to cut through the sweetness of the marmalade.

So that is what we did…shaved it. Sartori StraVeccio Parmesan from Plymouth, Wisconsin. It’s fruity, nutty and has some roasted caramel tones to it. To add a little more nuttiness, we added a pinch of fresh ground nutmeg to the base. The Parmesan shavers get tossed in at the end of the churn.

And there you have it folks. Our first ever “Fan Flavor Contest” comes to a close with Ann’s suggestion of Apricot Parmesan Frozbroz style. Congrats Ann, and excellent suggestion!

Don’t forget about our Indiegogo fundraising – we’ve got 44 days to go and need all the help we can get! http://www.indiegogo.com/frozbroz?a=446076

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A quick update: Ann got us her feedback in no time, and we thought we’d share it – but we can only take 50% of the credit since the idea was all Ann 🙂

Wow you guys! Could my prize be changed to a lifetime supply? Besides more for us, I’d like to serve some to all the people who wrinkled their noses at me when I told them the flavor.

Both apricot and Parmesan have the potential to dominate, but you interpreted the idea in a way I didn’t think of. Your ice cream recipe showcases both flavors while keeping them in balance with each other.

A truly decadent ice cream to savor slowly in order to appreciate the flavors and textures going on. I love to eat ice cream when it is like a treasure hunt to find all the goodies hidden in it. The apricot marmalade had an intensely deep and concentrated flavor and a great sticky texture with pieces of candied apricot. Finding the crumbles of Parmesan, which gave bursts of salty, tangy flavor, was my favorite part of the treasure hunt. And of course the body of the ice cream itself was luscious and creamy, with a hint of the apricot.

We all loved it.

My son started eating it and said “That’s really good tasting Parmesan!” My husband took one bite and exclaimed “OH, that is good! I didn’t think it would taste like this!”

To serve it, I made a shortbread crunch to sprinkle over the ice cream to replicate a favorite combination of mine which is a shortbread cookie topped with a cheese and something really sweet, like apricot or caramelized sugar. – Flavor Contest #1 Winner, Ann Harste

March 22, 2012

Sour Cream Vanilla Bean with Dark Chocolate Cake and Ganache Ribbon

We’ve been talking amongst ourselves over the past couple of months about wanting to collaborate more with some of our friends and fans on creating new flavors. The first collaboration with our friend Heidi Skoog and her Serious Jam was fantastic. We just completed our first fan flavor contest which we’ll be releasing next week, but we’ve also been lucky enough to have more of our compadres in town agree to throw their uber-talent into the mix (no pun intended). And the first of that crew: Sheela Namakkal, the local cupcake genius affectionately known to us as vice president of everything. If you stop down to the beautiful Mitre Box Framing Studio on Saturday mornings for “Cupcake Saturdays” (and we HIGHLY recommend you do) you’ll know why. She rules and her cupcakes rule more.

I have been wanting to do a vanilla bean ice cream with chocolate cake for a long time, and when I finally got around to it, Sheela was the first person I called. And as I expected, I was the one scrambling to figure out how to make the ice cream as good as the ingredients she produced to go in it.

Sheela rocked out some amazing dark chocolate cupcakes. These babies are as hand crafted as it gets and completed with 100% ScharffenBerger cocoa powder. They are DENSE with chocolate.

Dreamy.

To pair, she dreamed up some bitterwseet ganache, with a touch of irish cream and more 100% cocoa.

So much chocolate. So much.

So, it was my job to take this little stash that I so luckily procured, and turn it into ice cream.

First, as you’ve seen us do before, I disassembled the cupcakes into croutons, which were doused in brown butter, a little salt, and baked in the oven until they were crunchy enough to stand up in the cream.

These are far too snackable.

With the cake ready for it’s cream bath, it was time to address the cream itself.

We’ve used many variations of vanilla over the past years, but nothing beats the bean.

To pair with the vanilla, we used our sour cream base to give the typical vanilla flavor a little more depth and tang.

Westby’s is a cooperative creamery in Westby, Wisconsin and have been operating for over 100 years. It has a great flavor and texture, and incorporates seamlessly into our ice cream base. All sour creams are not equal.

The sour cream and vanilla seeds were mixed into the cream, tossed with the dark chocolate cake croutons and layered into the pints with the bittersweet ganache.

The dimensions of deep chocolate, hints of brown butter and salt, acidity from the sour cream and bright vanilla flavor are right in your face. And as Sheela would say, they are also “for your face”.

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 (3/23/2012) 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 50 days to go and need all the help we can get! http://www.indiegogo.com/frozbroz?a=446076

March 15, 2012

Spicy Thai Peanut with Candied Lime

Earlier this year, we contemplated using Sriracha in one of flavors. After suggesting the idea, a fan of ours proposed the idea of a Thai peanut. Ever since then peanuts and sri have been swimming through my brain, and although we didn’t use Sriracha here, the peanuts in this flavor pack a punch. Spicy Thai Peanut with Candied Lime.

Instead of Sriracha we decided to use Tien Tsin chilies from China. Here they are with lemon grass and limes. These three components along with salt are what bring life to the peanuts. We chose the Tien Tsin chilies because their spice hits you in the back of the throat. We wanted the the flavor of the cream to hit first and then bring it with a spicy finish. This is no joke folks, these peanuts pack a spicy punch.

The lemongrass, lime zest and chilies get pureed to a pulp in a food processor.

Look: peanuts! We roast em in the oven, drizzle with our reserved lime syrup(see below), and toss with salt and the spicy Thai puree. Then, back in the oven to dry.

Now here is where the reserved lime syrup comes from:

After peeling the lime we chop the zest, cover with water, and bring to a boil a few times to get all of the bitterness out. We then simmer the zest in a simple syrup until tender. The zest gets tossed with sugar and dried. What’s left over is a lime infused simple syrup great for mixed drinks, tea, or in this case, spicy Thai peanuts.

Here’s the finished products: candied lime and spicy Thai peanuts. Both are ready to get tossed into the churn.

Spicy Thai Peanut with Candied Lime. Each bite starts with a sweet sugary burst of lime, and then a crunchy peanut with a spicy finish.

Want to try some 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 (3/16/2012) 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!

March 8, 2012

Basil with Meyer Lemon Curd

In all of the chaos of kicking off our IndieGoGo fundraiser this week, we arrive at our favorite day. Or as it has become over the last year – flavor day.

And as luck would have it, the flavor I chose for the week of the kickoff proved to be a bit of a challenge.

We had been wanting to use Meyer lemons in a flavor since they are in season and a facebook flavor-storming session with our good friend Molly McNeil (of Minnesota Peach fame) pushed it into the spotlig

I envisioned this flavor to be a green hued, deeply flavored sweet basil ice cream with ribbons of meyer lemon curd glowing through each scoop. Unfortunately I realized after my first incarnation that we weren’t quite ready to cross into pesto cream sauce with lemon ice territory, which was exactly where we ended up after the first round.

Sometimes these flavors take on a personality during development, almost like they are a living, breathing thing. I’ve caught myself almost talking to a flavor idea, demanding that it cooperate or tell me what would make it happy. After some smooth talking, I finally found the right path, which included a few adjustments to find harmony.

First, the lemon curd.

Lemon curd is a great cake filling or baking ingredient, but thrown into ice cream in its basic form results in a hard, icy texture that doesn’t translate well. So to fix, the curd was baked in the oven to caramelize the sugars and reduce out the water content. The result is exactly the filling you get with a lemon bar, translucent with the melding of the sugar, butter, and eggs. It incorporates into the ice cream beautifully.

For the ice cream, I initially steeped the cream in basil and threw in minced basil to finish. The result was an overwhelming sour basil flavor, which if actually treated like pesto might be good, but without the balance of a walnut or pine nut was too much on its own. I’m not going to say Pesto is not workable because in all honesty its danced around our flavor list for awhile. But for now, it would wait.

The right decision was keeping the basil out of the ice cream until right at the end, where it was minced and added to provide an accent flavor to the Meyer Lemon (which is truly the star of the show) and leave the clean cream flavor some room to breathe.

The final product.

Want to try some 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 (3/9/2012) 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!

March 1, 2012

Miso Black Sesame

Winter is the season for many things in Minnesota, one of them being soup. It got me thinking about somehow incorporating one of Winters great pleasures with one of Summers great pleasures…ICE CREAM!

I’ve been reading a new cookbook I received as a birthday gift, and it has inspired new ideas and thoughts pertaining to cooking that are refreshing. For those of us into cooking, I think it is common to get a new book, and obsess over it for a few weeks or even months. So that’s where I’m at, and although the book is not a cookbook of Asian influence, it opened my mind to work with something I hadn’t thought about in ice cream before…Miso.

This is white Miso paste, aka “shiromiso” purchased at United Noodles in Minneapolis. If you have never been or are interested in Asian cooking, United Noodles is the bomb digity. It’s the largest Asian grocery in the Midwest. Go there!

Traditionally Miso is made from fermented rice, soybeans and/or barley mashed into a paste with salt. It originated in Japan and is used to season soups, sauces, vegetables, etc. If you’ve eaten at a Japanese restaurant you’ve likely seen Miso soup on the menu, if not slurped one down.

It’s flavor will be different depending on the type of Miso you buy, but the white Miso we used here has a sweet, salt, nutty flavor that is reminiscent of Parmigiano-Reggiano…deeeeelish.

Here we have Black Sesame Seeds, much like the more common variety of pale sesame. They get toasted and tossed in toward the end of the churn. They round out this flavor offering another dimension of nuttiness to the already nutty Miso.

Miso Black Sesame Ice Cream! It’s one of the great pleasures of all seasons in FrozBroz country.

Like to try some? 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 (3/2/2012) at 4pm and will announce them on our facebook page. 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!