We all made the mistake of leaving a container of ice cream on the kitchen counter. You can refreeze the half-melted treat, but you may find that the texture is more hard than creamy. Ice crystals are the culprit. Scientists at the University of Tennessee think they have found a plant-based Additive that is more effective and cheaper than the ice cream Additives currently used. The researchers presented their work at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Diego.
Food science is a multi-disciplinary field that uses chemistry, biology, and engineering to solve real-world problems. Good chemistry knowledge can be used to produce high-quality ice cream.
The science behind making ice cream is well known. Students in the physics department have been known to make their own ice cream using liquid nitrogen. Add any flavors to the milk, cream, and sugar mixture. As it freezes, slowly make that mixture. This adds air to the mixture. The best ice creams have an overrun of less than 25 percent compared to cheap commercial ice creams, where the overrun can be as high as 100 percent. Cheap ice creams melt more quickly and don't store as well because of the higher overrun. The final step in the process is to pack the soft ice cream mixture into containers.
AdvertisementYou want the smallest ice cream crystals to ensure a creamy texture. Small seed crystals are usually the result of the rapid chilling and churning process. Problems arise when ice cream is recrystallized. The dessert will take on that bad texture if refrozen ice crystals are larger than 50 micrometers.
emulsifiers and stabilizers are added to ice cream to make it stay creamy. The stabilizers help keep the ice cream moist and slow the growth of ice crystals. The stabilizers are not very effective. Sometimes they work in one product but not in another.
It isn't clear how these added ingredients interact with ice recrystallization. The focus of this research is to find and test better alternatives.
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