FROZBROZ – Page 33 – Minneapolis Craft Ice Cream

December 13, 2012

Cardamom Fruitcake

Fruit Cake is constantly the butt of holiday gift giving jokes. For years I heard about how supposedly terrible they were and had imagined this loaf to be some concoction of olives, yeast, nuts, dirt, grapes and cement. The truth is a well made fruit cake is pretty darn good and we thought it would be more than appropriate for a holiday flavor. Fortunately for us, we found out about these amazing “Not Your Average” fruitcakes from Sun Street Breads and jumped at the chance to use them in a flavor.

These babies are chock full of almonds, figs, crystallized ginger, candied orange peel, bittersweet chocolate and are soaked in rum and aged for at least a month.

Seriously, are you on board yet? They are dense, rich and absolutely wonderful in every sense of the word. I for one, would be thrilled if one of these showed up in a package for me.

For the ice cream we chose to use the fruit cake as-is – chopped up into smaller chunks. It is so rich and dense with rum and sugar that we felt it would hold up in the ice cream perfectly without any extra help, and it did that to say the least.

We chose to pair it with a cardamom ice cream – one of our favorite spices that makes its presence most known around the holidays, especially in the desserts and cookies from our Norwegian heritage. The cream is steeped with fresh ground cardamom while the mix is hot to infuse the cream with the bright, fruity flavor cardamom is known for.

To finish the fruitcake pieces are tossed into the cream mix while spinning in the maker.

The result is a bright, cardamom spiced ice cream decorated with dense chunks of fruit cake that give you a variety of nutty, fruity and chocolate-y bites, with the rum of the cake humming softly in the background all the while .

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 12/14 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!

December 6, 2012

Spiced Nuts

We’re continuing our holiday flavor tour this week with another nut infused ice cream. We got inspired back in October with our Black Walnut ice cream, and since, have been on a nut-infused ice cream making rampage. To go along with our holiday theme, we thought we would make a mixed bag and spice it up a little bit. After all, who doesn’t love a holiday party with a bowl of spiced nuts on the table? Let’s get this holiday party started right with this week’s flavor: Spiced Nuts.

Nuts! Raw nuts! From light to dark: Cashews, Almonds, Pecans. These make up the backbone of this flavor adding both rich flavors and creamy texture with all those natural nut oils.

First things first, nuts get laid out on a sheet pan and into the oven for a roast. The roasting brings out all those nutty flavors we are all familiar with.

After the roast, the nuts get crushed in the food processor, and then into our ice cream base for a hot steep. The mix gets chilled down in an ice bath and the crushed nuts get strained out, for a smooth nut cream base.

Now that we have our nut-infused ice cream we can get down to putting some spice into those nuts. Shortly after conceiving the idea for this week’s flavor, the December issue of Food and Wine magazine showed up, and what was in it? A nice recipe for Sugar-and-Spice Nuts. We liked it so much that we decided to use the three spices used in the recipe to spice up our nut cream. Check the recipe out for yourselves right here: Sugar-and-Spice Nuts. In the picture above starting at the bottom, moving clockwise: Cayenne Pepper, Chili Powder and Cinnamon. The spices get mixed into our nut cream along with a generous salting. Into the maker for a churn.

The result is a rich creamy nut-infused ice cream with a salty sweet and ever-so-slightly spicy finish.

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 12/07 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 29, 2012

Roasted Chestnut Brown Butter

To continue the holiday theme – how about a flavor inspired by a song? “The Christmas Song”, more commonly known as “Chestunuts Roasting on an Open Fire” is a Christmas classic that was originally written in 1944 by Mel Torme; its most famous rendition is probably its first – performed by Nat King Cole. I’ve probably heard the song 500 times over the course of my life, and it was only a few years ago that I started to wonder what roast chestnuts would actually be like. In addition, I also wondered, who actually does this as a family tradition? Well, why not try them for the first time and make ice cream out of them too?

Chestnuts aren’t exactly easy to find, but pop up around Thanksgiving because of their use in stuffing. I noticed them in the produce section a few weeks back and figured to give it a shot.

Before being fired, the chestnuts need have a slit put in each nut, to keep them from popping as steam builds up inside while they are roasting. Then they get simmered in some salted water for a bit to add a bit of extra steam to the process and give them a nice salty coating.

Next, the chestnuts go onto a hot fire for about 15 minutes or so, being tossed often to keep them from burning on any sides. While they roasted we mixed up a batch of our brown butter base for these chestnuts to take a bath in.

It’s times like these that I kick myself for not taking enough pictures. Like one of the nutmeat before being ground.

That’s right, the nutmeat. Once these weird little nuts are peeled, they look like little beige brains. So we took them and ground them up to steep in the cream base while hot.

After steeping, we strained out the chestnut leftovers and gave it a spin in the maker.

The end result is a smooth, clean ice cream with hints of brown butter and a subtle but addictive sweet roast chestnut 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 11/30 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 22, 2012

Cranberry w/ Apple Apple Cider Cognac Caramel

Happy Thanksgiving y’all! It’s finally upon us, and through all it’s traditions, the one that we’d like to focus on is the Fall harvest. After kicking off the pre-Thanksgiving party with our Roasted Pecan with Pumpkin Caramel, we couldn’t think of a more festive and appropriate ingredient for this weeks flavor than cranberries. Add apples to the mix, a little cognac for good cheer, and we’re talk’in Thanksgiving flavor of the week: Cranberry w/ Apple Apple Cider Cognac Caramel. Let’s get it started…

Cranberries! These are organic cranberries from James Lake Farms in Wisconsin Rapids, WI. Just the site of this bowl of berries can get you jammin right into the holiday spirit.

We’ve never made an actual cranberry flavored ice cream, so it seemed fitting that today be the day to make that happen.

Cranberries, like many other fruits and berries pose the ever occurring obstacle in ice cream: their water content can make the ice cream icy, unless manipulated in some way.

If you actually read this blog, you’ll know that we sound like a broken record with our talk of water content in fruits going into our ice cream. Good thing is, you’re still reading.

To counter the water content issue, we decided to make a chutney. We started it out with our berries, a mix of sugars, orange juice, and cognac.

The mixture gets simmered down, the cranberries pop, and eventually the chutney comes alive…

Bang-go! Vibrant, tart and toothsome cranberry chutney. We add the chutney into our ice cream base that we mixed with both cane and brown sugars.

Some of you may have read the title to this weeks flavor and thought, “dudes, typo…you totally put two “Apple(s)” in there”. Yeah, well, that’s pretty much what we did. The first of which are actual apples, diced, tossed with cinnamon and brown sugar, and then slowly roasted in the oven until candied and caramelly. In the end, we add these tiny apple chunkers to our other “apple”, the apple cider cognac caramel.

If you’re looking for an easy apple cider caramel sauce recipe, check out this one from The Cafe Sucre Farine blog. We adapted it to work in our ice cream, but the original is fantastic and explains the process well.

The two main players go head to head. Hoch Orchard organic apple cider, located right here in Minnesota along with Courvoisier Cognac.

After the caramel comes off the heat, we added in a little more Cognac to really bring out those brandy flavors and thin it out. The caramel provides a tart cider flavor that will undoubtedly pair well with the cranberry ice cream.

Our tiny roasted apple chunkers get added to the caramel and then layered into the ice cream during packaging.

The result is a sweet cranberry ice cream with a tart apple apple cider cognac caramel that characterizes the Fall harvest and gives us much to be thankful for. Cheers!

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 11/23 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 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!