FROZBROZ – Page 23 – Minneapolis Craft Ice Cream

November 7, 2013

Donut with Maple Caramel

We’re no strangers to donuts in our ice cream, which has us always looking for better varieties and shops around town. This week, thanks to our friend Heidi, we found a new shop. Well, new to us at least, although it’s been around since 2008 – SugaRush. Keoni Nguyen, owner of SugaRush, along with his son, are making some of the best classic donuts around, such as the bear claw, long johns, and bismarcks. His dough is nothing but perfection, being sweet, tender and yeasty, while maintaining a light airiness about it. These donuts are destined for our ice cream. And so the pursuit began to deconstruct one of my favorite classics: the maple long john. This week we’re calling it our Donut with Maple Caramel. Shall we?

This is one of SugaRush’s glazed raised donuts. Dear lord these are amazing. They aren’t reinventing the wheel here, but they are making an exceptional dough, which leads to an exceptional donut. You must go try one for yourself. The raised donut is the building block for the maple long john, so for the ice cream, this is our starting point. In order for the donuts to hold up in the ice cream, I decided to make croutons out of these glazers. They’re diced and then baked in the oven until crunchy. The croutons go into the ice cream at the end of the churn.

Next, the “maple glaze”. I made the decision to go with a maple caramel for the glaze portion, because I thought a traditional glaze would disappear in the ice cream. First, our sugar is caramelized, at which time cream is added followed by our maple syrup. The maple syrup thins out the caramel nicely while adding natualy maple flavor to the caramel. The caramel gets layered into the pints during packaging.

Donut with Maple Caramel. Consider this a better variety – a play on the classic maple long john.

Want to try it? 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 11/8/13 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 31, 2013

Butternut Maple Cashew

We’ve been on a roll with the veggie flavors, and this is one I’ve been kicking around for some time. Butternut Squash is a fall favorite of mine and we enjoy it in many ways, from soup to roasted to pureed. The trick with Butternut in ice cream was to make sure it’s versatile buttery flavor didn’t get silenced by sweetness or what it was combined with. I chose to use maple sugar as the sweetness and round it out with some salty, maple candied cashews.

To infuse the squash into the cream, it was diced and roasted off, to cook out the moisture content, caramelize the sugars and intensify the flavor. Its a fantastic way to cook the vegetable on its own, and works extremely well in ice cream.

The roasty chunks of squash get pureed in with some cream and then added to our maple sugar ice cream base.

Cashews. Wonderful, cashews. These were candied with more of the maple sugar and a healthy sprinkle of salt. Once candied and cooled, the cashews are added in during the churn to provide a nice salty/sweet crunch.

And there she blows. Butternut Maple Cashew Ice Cream. A wonderfully smooth, roasted butternut squash flavored ice cream with echoes of maple and crunchy maple candied cashews.
Want to try it? 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 11/1/13 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 24, 2013

Charred Cauliflower

This week we set out on a flavor quest that needed to become a reality. We’ve said it before, but it’s hard to find an ingredient that doesn’t marry well in ice cream, and we can safely say that has been the case with all of our vegetable experimentations. Cauliflower is one that we haven’t played around with too much, and I just couldn’t get this idea out of my head to char cauliflower over a wood fire. I mean, just to eat that sounded good to me, but putting it in ice cream? Yeah, that had to work. Let’s find out…

It always starts with having wonderful ingredients and this head of cauliflower from Gardens of Eagan couldn’t be any more wonderful. It’s still warm from being on the truck coming from the farm. Look at it! It’s perfect! To get the process started, I lit up a batch of oak charcol in a silo type charcoal started. After preparing the coals, I threw a grill grate right over the top of the silo and began charring the cauliflower on all sides. By charring, my hope was to bring out some natural sweetness and nutiness from the caramelization. It worked!

After the charring, the cauliflower gets pureed with cream and then cooked in our organic sugar cane ice cream base. After cooking and steeping, the cauliflower gets strained through a fine mesh sieve. The ice cream base is salted and cooled before it’s ready for the churn.

It’s ready and it’s a reality! This weeks flavor: Charred Cauliflower – ice cream infused with wood fired cauliflower. It’s creamy, nutty, and earthy, and it’s ready for your mouth.

Want to try it? 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 10/25/13 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 17, 2013

Apple Peanut Butter

I often think of the impact of this venture has on our kids. My son is an extremely picky eater, but he’s eaten things that he would never dream of even considering were it not translated to him in the form of ice cream. Our boys are around ice cream all of the time, have access to it far more than I ever did, and are developing preferences in flavor that is a little mind boggling. Pretty cool.

On the other hand, they tend to have an equal impact on what we do. Obviously having children means the thought of the nutrition (or lack thereof) in ice cream is always on our minds, which is why we preach moderation, small portions, exceptional quality and big flavors. They also help us remember what is was like to be a kid ourselves, and some of the foods that we might have forgotten. Enter, Apples and Peanut Butter.

Another apple flavor wasn’t in the plans for this fall, but in my quest to get my son a healthy snack – apples and peanut butter came into the fray. Almost instantly he and my wife turned to me and said – “this should be an ice cream flavor”. They were right. Shall we?

For this flavor, I chose to bypass whole apples, in favor of Apple Cider. I’ve already hinted at my fandom of Hoch’s apples, and their cider is coming from high quality apples which means it’s hard to go wrong.

The challenge of this particular ice cream flavor was making an apple flavored ice cream without fruit in it. To accomplish that goal, cider was reduced with sugar to provide both the tart apple flavor and the sugar source for the cream base.

I chose a fantastic natural peanut butter to swirl into the cream, but it was too oily and thick to go into the ice cream base on its own. The peanut butter was combined with cream and a little bit of sugar to thin it out a bit and make a peanut butter sauce to be swirled into the cream base.

Pretty straightforward really, but bursting with flavor. Tart apple ice cream swirled with ribbons of salty natural peanut butter. Evoking the very snack we all knew and loved as kids – and probably as adults too.

Want to try it? 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 10/18/13 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 10, 2013

Buttermilk Biscuit with Ground Cherry Jam

For those of you who actually read our flavor explorations and how we go about our processes, you likely know that we coin a good ol’ frozbroz flavor brainstorming session as a “flavor storm”. During one of these recent flavor storming sessions, the topic of buttermilk buscuits came up. It came naturally, as we love playing around with breads, doughs, and of course, extra dairy in our ice cream. So with buttermilk buscuits on the brain, the beginning of a flavor was born. To top it off, we just recenetly broke down a batch of ground cherry jam with fresh ground cherries from the magnificant Bossy Acers. First of all, who doesn’t like buscuits and jam? It turned into a no brainer. I mean, ground cherry jam in ice cream pretty much makes for an automatic 5 stars, but add in the buttermilk buscuits – now we’re elevating this concept to an off the charts scenrio. Let’s get it started with this week’s flavor: Buttermilk Buscuit with Ground Cherry Jam.

We’ve never actually made buttermilk buscuits before, and I am sure that we have a lot to learn, but for first-timers, these buscuits couldn’t have turned out any better for our purposes. After doing a little recipe research, it seemed the proven method was to use a food processor for the job. We found out that the key to great buttermilk buscuits is agitating the dough as little as possible, and the processor allows for that by doing the mixing with just a few pulses. And that’s just what we did…first, pulsing the butter, flour, leveners, and salt. Next, pulsing in our organic buttermilk from Kalona, IA. Then, it’s a gentle pat down of the dough before cutting and baking off in the oven on a sheet pan. That’s it! Buttermilk buscuits! But actually, that’s not it. We’re not done with them yet.

We can’t just throw buscuits into our ice cream. We could, but that’s just not our style. We talk a lot about textures in our ice cream, and although the concept of soft buscuits has potential to be texturally pleasing, we made the decision to make the buscuits crunchy to add contrast. To do this, we cut our buscuits into croutons, toss with a little butter, and into the oven to become condensed, salty, buttermilk buscuit crunchers. Trust us, it was worth the extra effort. These crunchers are tossed in to our organic cane sugar base at the end of the churn.

And then…these! Beautiful fresh ground cherries from our local farmers, Bossy Acres. We’ve said it before, and we will most certainly say it again – it is of uttmost impotantance for all of us to support our local farmers. I’m not sure I could explain it any better than the ladies at Bossy Acres, so click HERE for a great explanation of what supporting local means for all of us – our community. Back to the ice cream…Ground Cherries! After the very laborious task of peeling off the outer wrapper of the ground cherries, we mash them, and cook them down with a bit of sugar until we have our jam – liquid gold. The ground cherry jam is layered into the pints during packagaing.

The result is our rich creamy ice cream packed with crunchy salted buttermilk buscuit croutons all layered with Minnesota-grown ground cherry jam. It’s just another flavor storm concept that’s been elevated to an off the charts scenerio.

Want to try it? 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 10/11/13 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!