The science behind making ice cream
Discover the chemistry of ice cream.
© American Chemical Society (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
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Transcript
RICH HARTEL: Hi, I'm Rich Hartel. I'm a professor here in food engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ice Cream is an interesting and probably one of the most complex food materials that there are. It's a foam, because we're aerating. It's a dispersion, because it's got ice crystals in there. It's an emulsion because there are fat globules. And in fact, we're going to break down those fat globules so they're partially destabilized to help hold up the air cells.
It's also a micellar phase, because the caseins in the milk and the cream are in a micellar form. And it's also a solution, so those dissolved sugars, dissolved proteins from the milk, and dissolved salts as well.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Ice cream mix is made with sugar, cream, stabilizers to help control the ice crystals, and then, we add emulsifiers to help control the fat globules. In order to call it "ice cream," it has to have at least 10% fat. And that fat has to come from the cow. It has to be milk fat.
In homemade ice cream, we use brine as our refrigerant. We'll take salt and add that to ice. And the salt depresses the freezing point of the ice, which lowers the temperature of this mixture down below, somewhere around, minus 10 degrees centigrade or so-- depending on how patient we are.
This process has been running now for 45 or 50 minutes. It takes that long to freeze enough ice to overcome the power of this motor and shut this off.
And now, we've turned off the ice cream making machine. The ice cream is done to our satisfaction.
Now, we're going to pour it into our containers and harden it for the rest of the process. So if you were to eat this, it would taste really good. But you can even see, on the surface here, that the ice crystals must be fairly large, because it's not a smooth, dry texture.
We're going to harden this. First, we're going to pour these into containers here. For perspective purposes, the ice crystals in our Babcock ice cream are on the order of 30 to 40 microns in size. These crystals, on average, are probably already on the order of 60 microns, and it's about 50 microns we can feel in our mouth. So once we harden these, they're going to be about 70 to 80 microns and very, very distinct in characteristics.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Ice Cream is an interesting and probably one of the most complex food materials that there are. It's a foam, because we're aerating. It's a dispersion, because it's got ice crystals in there. It's an emulsion because there are fat globules. And in fact, we're going to break down those fat globules so they're partially destabilized to help hold up the air cells.
It's also a micellar phase, because the caseins in the milk and the cream are in a micellar form. And it's also a solution, so those dissolved sugars, dissolved proteins from the milk, and dissolved salts as well.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Ice cream mix is made with sugar, cream, stabilizers to help control the ice crystals, and then, we add emulsifiers to help control the fat globules. In order to call it "ice cream," it has to have at least 10% fat. And that fat has to come from the cow. It has to be milk fat.
In homemade ice cream, we use brine as our refrigerant. We'll take salt and add that to ice. And the salt depresses the freezing point of the ice, which lowers the temperature of this mixture down below, somewhere around, minus 10 degrees centigrade or so-- depending on how patient we are.
This process has been running now for 45 or 50 minutes. It takes that long to freeze enough ice to overcome the power of this motor and shut this off.
And now, we've turned off the ice cream making machine. The ice cream is done to our satisfaction.
Now, we're going to pour it into our containers and harden it for the rest of the process. So if you were to eat this, it would taste really good. But you can even see, on the surface here, that the ice crystals must be fairly large, because it's not a smooth, dry texture.
We're going to harden this. First, we're going to pour these into containers here. For perspective purposes, the ice crystals in our Babcock ice cream are on the order of 30 to 40 microns in size. These crystals, on average, are probably already on the order of 60 microns, and it's about 50 microns we can feel in our mouth. So once we harden these, they're going to be about 70 to 80 microns and very, very distinct in characteristics.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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