FROZBROZ – Page 17 – Minneapolis Craft Ice Cream

May 8, 2014

Almond with Orange Blossom Syrup

If you like to cook, there’s a good chance you have a favorite cookbook. For me, one that I regularly turn to for recipes and ideas is “A Mediterranean Feast” by Clifford A. Wright. The book encompasses the evolution of Mediterranean cuisines and their history of origin. It’s a learning experience every time I open it up. A few years back a came across a recipe in the book that called for orange blossom water. It was something I had never worked with, but sparked my interest. Fast forward to a few months ago…I decided to purchase a bottle. Over the recent Easter weekend, I broke it out. My wife made an almond cake for our Spring feast, and I decided to make an orange blossom syrup to set the cake on and soak up. The combo was fantastic! The floral tones of the orange blossom syrup made for the perfect seasonal dessert. Pure inspiration for this week’s flavor – Almond with Orange Blossom Syrup

This is almond paste. Sometimes it comes in a can and sometimes it comes in a tube. Either way, it’s pretty delish. The cake my wife made called for a lot of almond paste, so that’s what I went with to make my ice cream base. I dissolved the paste into our standard organic cane sugar base during the cooking process. After a brief steep, the paste is strained through a fine mesh strainer to remove any gritty solids. The base is salted, cooled and ready to churn.

Next, the orange blossom syrup. The orange blossom water, as you might expect, tastes almost as a sweet flower blossom would smell. To offset the floral tones a bit, I decided to add a little lemon juice and lemon zest to the syrup. The syrup is simple, as they say…water and cane sugar boiled/reduced to the proper temperature. We finish the syrup by adding in our orange blossom water and straining out the lemon zest. The syrup is cooled and ready to layer into the almond ice cream during packaging.

Serious goodness here people. It’s a dense silky almond ice cream with pockets of sweet floral tones from the orange blossom syrup. It almost makes you feel as if Spring is in the air.

Like to try some? You can be one of two lucky winners of this fantastic, 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. Winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 5/9/14 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!

May 1, 2014

Dark Chocolate Coconut Orange

We’ve only done a handful of coconut based, vegan/dairy free flavors, but we intend to do more – lots more. Everyone should be able to eat good ice cream, so we’re making it our duty to make sure the dairy free and vegan crowd get some too. Coconut ice cream presents some new challenges, but we’re committing ourselves to making sure we have flavors just as interesting and appealing in this category too – and making it our own goal to make sure we refine and perfect to ensure the ice cream is as good as it can possibly be.

As soon as we announced we were putting our first vegan/dairy free flavor up for sale, we had a immediate request last week for Dark Chocolate Coconut with a hint of Orange. Who are we not to oblige?

This flavor is pretty simple and the ingredient list fairly short. The foundation is nothing but coconut milk and organic cane sugar.

The orange flavor comes from zest of the orange, which steeps in the ice cream and gives it just a hint of orange flavor.

The final step is adding Valrhona cocoa powder in until a nice deep dark chocolate is achieved. And some sea salt to bring out the flavor even more.

The scoop is a luxurious dark chocolate with a whisper of orange – you can hardly tell it’s made with coconut milk. Vegan and dairy free.
Like to try some? You can be one of two lucky winners of this fantastic, 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. Winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 5/2/14 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!

April 24, 2014

White Chocolate Juniper

Spring is here and we are nearing the beginning of the growing season here in Minnesota. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, we still have a few winter flavors to download on y’all. This week’s inspiration came from chef Linton Hopkins of Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta. Reading a publication, I ran across his recipe for cheese pie, which included a number of different components including a juniper ganache made with white chocolate and juniper berries. That’s it! This week’s flavor was born – White Chocolate Juniper. Shall we?

These are juniper berries from Penzeys Spices. If you are wondering what juniper tastes like, pour yourself a shot of gin, as gin is flavored with juniper berries. The have a pungent pine flavor to them. For our ice cream base, we want to infuse the base with juniper, so the berries are crushed and added in. The ice cream base is cooked infusing the cream with juniper. Next is the addition of white chocolate.

This is 100% organic cocoa butter. Cocoa butter is the fat that is extracted from the cocoa bean. Generally, chocolate is made with a combination of cocoa butter, cocoa powder and sugar. White chocolate, on the other hand, is made using cocoa butter, sugar, vanilla, and usually, milk powder. It smells strong of cocoa powder, but is quite plain in flavor…almost flavorless. When in your mouth, it melts easily, and hits the same area on your palate that a bitter dark chocolate would, but it is very mild. We thought we would try and make a white chocolate ice cream from scratch, and since two of the major components to white chocolate are already in our ice cream (dairy, sugar), this seemed to be a no-brainer. After the the crushed juniper berries are infused into the ice cream base, we whisked in vanilla and cocoa butter to the hot base. The mixture is strained, and a few of the left over crushed juniper berries are added back into the base. The base is cooled and is ready for the churn.

White Chocolate Juniper ice cream! The juniper and white chocolate combine in harmony as their bitter qualities are tamed by the sweet cream vanilla base.

Like to try some? You can be one of two lucky winners of this fantastic, 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. Winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 4/25/14 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!

April 20, 2014October 30, 2023

Minnesota Business Magazine

“Licenese to Chill: Why a key ingredient for the Minneapolis ice cream venture FrozBroz is patience”

April 17, 2014

Toast and Blueberry Bourbon Sage Jam (Serious Jam)

Once in awhile we stumble onto something that makes all of our experimentation worth it. Ever since we’ve befriended our pal Heidi Skoog of Serious Jam, I’ve wanted to do a Toast and Jam flavor to pair with one of her wonderful jams. The challenge was figuring out a way to make ice cream taste like toast without having soggy toast floating in it.

I had originally planned to make croutons like we do with many other baked goods, but I wasn’t convinced croutons from bread would hold up in the ice cream long enough. The “ah-ha” moment came as I pulled the toast from the toaster. When I was a little kid, my mom would save dark or burnt toast by scraping the dark spots off with a knife. Why not just scrape the toasted layer off the bread?

And that is exactly what I did. Using some fantastic sourdough from the New French bakery located right in our neighborhood, I made a bunch of dark toast and scraped the toasted strata off into the sweet cream base. The toasted bits all steeped in the base as it heated, and the toast flavor that is produced is nothing short of spectacular.

But before we get all caught up in the idea of how much fun toast ice cream is, let’s talk seriously for a moment about Serious Jam. For this flavor I used one of Heidi’s banner jars, Blueberry Bourbon Sage jam. It is a fantastic, classically made jam full of ripe blueberries – singing with hints of sage and bourbon. Every one of her jams is a winner. We’re lucky enough to share a kitchen with her so we’ve become a little spoiled when it comes to jam. Look for her to be selling right beside us in the kitchen at upcoming sales.

Back to the matter at hand, Toast and (Serious) Blueberry Bourbon Sage Jam ice cream. I was literally jumping up and down at the result – the ice cream is brimming with toast flavor, and makes the perfect match for some very Serious jam.

Like to try some? You can be one of two lucky winners of this fantastic, 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. Winners will be drawn randomly on Friday 4/18/14 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!