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Making Ice Cream With Liquid Nitrogen
JasonMaggini writes "Popular Science has an article on how to whip up a batch of ice cream in 30 seconds or so by using liquid nitrogen. Just the thing for those hot summer days. The article is by Theodore Gray, creator of the ultra-spiffy Periodic Table Table."
When I was about 10, we went on vacation with a group of people that happened to have a lot of doctors. These doctors happened to have easy access to liquid nitrogen for medical reasons. They brought a couple huge containers of liquid nitrogen, and we took sodas and dipped them in with a string for a couple seconds. Nice and slushy :-)
I've done this with some friends just last week. It looks quite scary, espesially when the physics buffs start putting the liquid nitrogen in their mouth.
To do this right you need to use more than 30 sec if you do it by hand like we did.
Use 2 eggs, and 0.6L of cream and mix in a bowl.
Chop one 100g dark chocolate bar and mix with the rest.
Add 0.1 L Irish Cream.
Whip it all together while someone pours a small stream of liquid nitrogen into the bowl.
Don't do it to fast (30 sec will give you large frozen lumps...).
When the ice starts to get thick enough, stop pouring nitrogen and put the lid back on the nitrogen container. You can play some more with it *after* you have eaten your ice-cream.
This would be a great idea for a bussines, set up a stall near a beach and sell on-the-fly real ice-cream to tourists. $5 a cup, the show is for free!
- Ost
---- Sig. gone.
I'm much more impressed with his experiments with sodium
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Tips (haven't read the article yet, so some of these might be redundant) -
- make sure you have good ventilation.
Nitrogen can fill the room and will push out the good air.
- don't use a regular blender.
Unless you have a heavy duty egg beater the nitrogen will be freezing the ice cream mix so fast that you'll bust the motor. Use a heavy duty one and then switch over to a large metal spoon.
- good ingredents count.
Use good cream. Add powdered milk for the extra protein. (I like adding a little bit of high quality protein that I use while working out) We used fresh dates, strawberries or whatever. If you use vanilla don't use that crappy stuff. Good vanilla is well worth the price - sort of like good basalmic vinegar. Once you've had the real deal the stuff supermarkets sell tastes like crap.
- Invite a bunch of friends.
It's a great party. Do the typical physics/chemistry tricks with the remaining liquid nitrogen. The shattering tomatoe or fake hand in the nitrogen tricks are always classics.
Actually...
Due to the Leidenfrost effect this might actually work, but it also might cause loss of teeth (seen it) tongue (seen pictures) or stomic (don't want to know).
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
there are two problems with making icecream with liquid nitrogen: first, you cannot buy nitrogen at 7-11, you need to either work in a lab or have a friend who does (the latter being my case). second, good icecream is generated by continous stirring of the stuff while it slowly freezes. in this fashion the batch freezes in a polycristalline state and not in one giant single-crystal slab. this is very important as good icecram is supposed to smooth in texture and not "icy". it is almos impossible to do this with the liquid nitrogen version because things freeze too fast. from my experience i have learned that the best ice cream maker is made by KRUPS: stick the bowl into the freezer overnight (or into liquid nitrogen if you want to speed things up!) and enjoy a full batch the next day of the flavors you like. of course you could run into the store and buy some icecream, but do you know what is in that stuff?
I've done this - it's fun and impresses the girls, but harder in an office/lab than in a well stocked kitchen.
Once my girlfriend was visiting me at work and I was stuck late while I was finishing some experiments. The kitchenette was stocked with only the usual bad coffee gear--ultra-pasteurized cream cups and sugar packets and bad coffee--and she was restless and hungry. I asked if she wanted some ice cream and she thought I was teasing.
So I took one of the vacuum insulated coffee carafes and filled it dramatically with LN2 from roll-around dewar in the lab (any time you crack the liquid feed on one of those things its pretty dramatic with the hissing and the steam and the gurgling and the spattering, dancing beads of LN2). As an aside, vacuum insulated coffee carafes filled with LN2 will hold it for more than a day.
I carried it boiling and fogging back to the kitchenette as she followed at a more than safe distance. I found a plastic bowl in the sink and filled it with the contents of about 100 of those little ultra-pasteurized coffee creamers and about 100 packets of sugar, brewed up a fresh pot of coffee and skimmed the first few seconds worth off - when it actually has some flavor and added it to the bowl. She looked mighty dubious, but the glass liner had cooled enough that the carafe didn't seem dangerous any more so she moved in to watch.
Then while I stirred the mixture with a plastic spoon (and, don't forget - while wearing the bright blue cryogenic safety gloves and full face shields) she poured in the LN2 which filled the bowl with dense fog that poured out, over the counter, and down around our ankles, spreading out across the floor, looking for all the world like a bad sci-fi movie.
In about 30 seconds we had a bowl of half decent coffee ice cream to share.
And, for just a little while, she thought being a geek was really cool...
I remember reading that you can also make "impossible" stuff such as whiskey sorbet with liquid N2 (would require around -30ÂC to freeze strong alcohol).
Be careful to use a wooden spoon though or else your tongue will stick very hard to the cold steel!!!
N2O (nitrous oxide) is used to make instant whipped cream - in a pressurised state it dissolves in fat, so when the pressure is released, it expands in the cream, causing it to go light and fluffy. I'm wondering if N2 might have a similar effect, making the icecream lighter and fluffier than it might normally be? Solubility of N2 in fat? It's non-polar so it should dissolve, no?
Unfortunately N2 don't have the same effect as N2O when inhaled |-)
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
The goal of ice cream is to make the ice crystals really small. Big ice crystals feel grainy in your mouth. Ice cream should be smooth.
Ordinarily, you achieve that by stirring the ice cream constantly. With liquid NO2, you achieve the same effect by freezing everything before the crystals have a chance to grow.
So yeah, you do get better ice cream this way.
There's also a lot less air whipped into it. For my taste, there's too little; a spoonful has too much "cold" in it to really taste it. Since it has more ice cream and less air, you get more mass in a spoonful, and thus more cold. But that's all a matter of taste; that's exactly what Ben and Jerry make all their money at. A little goes a long way.
We used to do this 30 years ago-I was finishing my physics PhD at the time. I am sure people with access to liquid nitrogen had done it long before us.
This is old news!
I'm nots ure, but a professor I knew at Northwestern sometimes gargled with liquid nitrogen to impress people during "chemistry day" type demos. Supposedly if you keep exhaling and moving the stuff around in your mouth, the air is enough of an insulator to keep from freezing your tongue off.
I had lots of fun working as a programmer in an organic chem lab there. When we needed a break from coding, we'd go invent weird chemistry demos or throw defective glassware against the wall. I don't think I'll ever try the liquid nitrogen gargling, though.
-- Laura
Frozen stakes and hamburgers in a cantene are an even better idea. We used to do it at the Uni. All you need is an unsuspecting victim that has forgotten to pick up a fork, a knife or a napkin. As a result you have your 30 secs and when the poor sod comes back his meal is frozen solid and steaming water vapour.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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What happens there is the Leidenfrost effect in action- the temperature inside your mouth is well above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (77K, -196 degC, -321 degF, 138.6 degR), so that when the liquid contacts your mouth, a very small amount of it quickly boils off, and creates a layer of vapor between the remaining liquid and the flesh of your mouth. This vapor layer acts as an insulation blanket, allowing you to consume small quantities of liquid nitrogen without flash-freezing your palate.
The Leidenfrost effect is also sometimes demonstrated by wetting your hand with water, and then briefly plunging your hand into a container of molten lead. The same principle applies, as the lead is above the Leidenfrost point of water, so the water will form a vapor layer around your hand that insulates it from the molten lead. As much as I would like to believe that since the same principle applies, this is just as safe as brief exposure to LN2, I'm rather reluctant to try this.
Also, molten lead is a lot harder to come by, for me anyway, than liquid nitrogen- I work at UIUC's helium liquefier, so there's up to 5000 gallons of LN2 right outside the window (used both for providing to research groups and for the helium liquefier itself), and LN2 hoses on the wall. I'm generally pretty cautious with the stuff though- it does sting when it contacts bare skin, and as labels on the dewars often remind me, pure nitrogen DOES NOT SUPPORT LIFE, so you want to make sure that if you use large quantities (and the 220L dewars some groups have qualify) in a ventilated area. I've personally not found working with liquid nitrogen to be very dangerous- it's certainly less dangerous than some of the stuff used in an organic chemistry lab.
I remember the lab manual intro for a chemiluminescence/phosphoresence experiment that used things like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and the solvent DMSO (which isn't terribly toxic by itself, but can be absorbed through the skin, and has a nasty tendency to take other compounds with it), that had a warning that went something like: "Most of the reagents and solvents used in this lab are toxic, flammable, carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratogenic, or some combination thereof." LN2 and LHe are just really, really cold.
Anyway, I've had liquid nitrogen ice cream a number of times before- it tends to be a perennial favorite of many of the science-oriented clubs on campus, as well as a popular demonstration at the annual Engineering Open House- some ChemE's mixed some up this year- using LN2 I poured for them the day before, which was sweet. The ice cream is usually pretty good, IMO. The consistency can be rather variable, and it isn't as good as cranked homemade stuff, but hey- I'm not going to pass up free ice cream.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
I can see how this would work ..... I have an electric ice-cream maker that works by freezing a container {thin conductive aluminium pan inside plastic bowl containing brine, giving a nice high thermal mass} in the deep freezer overnight, then an electric motor stirs the mixture continuously to prevent lump formation {which would ruin the texture}.
..... Also, since nitrogen boils at a lower temperature than oxygen, you can use it to distill oxygen from the air. Liquid nitrogen is cool, but liquid oxygen is hot stuff!
The place I used to work at actually had a liquid-nitrogen-cooled test chamber. Unfortunately, the plumbing did not seem to include a drain valve, otherwise I might have been tempted to help myself to some {if you are going to do this, BTW, drill a small hole in the stopper and cup of your flask so that there is no chance for pressure to build up}. Best demo I've seen was to pour some liquid mercury into a hammer head mould, dip in a stick to act as handle, freeze, and knock in several big nails. Bet they wouldn't be allowed to do that nowadays
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Photo of dutch physics students doing exactly this: clicky here
A bunch of people have been commenting on the professor who used to gargle LN2. The man's name was Jearl Walker, author of The Flying Circus of Physics, who published an excellent essay describing exactly how to do it. He also talks about dipping your hand in molten lead, as well as walking on fire. He is the one who mentioned that when you let the LN2 touch your teeth, they crack.
Or maybe we'll go with the Simpsons "chocolate Cod..." (a chocolate covered cod on a stick...) But does anybody remember sesame street from about 24 years ago, they had descriptions of the character's favourite flavours and oscar the grouch chose "Anchovy and pickle"? My mum never made ice cream again after we watched that. Not only did we request all of theirs, including the birdseed one (not to parents out there, if your kids ask for this use vanilla with shelled sunflower seeds) but we started telling her the flavours WE wanted... (Peanut butter and jam, blueberry/cinnamon, pancake and butter and syrup and sausage, and our best never-made flavour, the "banana split" one that we wanted to use: orange 'jello' powder, red food colouring, nuts, bananas, and mum's homemade beef stew.) Hey, I was three, my sister was four, we figured it would work. Mum flat-out refused, and started making layered juice popsicles instead.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
I was on the fog crew for a show once, and we had a huge freezer full of dry ice to play with... Muwhahahahaha. Many of the things you can do with LN2 can also be done with dry ice, though dry ice is pretty hot compared to liquid nitrogen, plus of course, the obvious difference that it's solid instead of liquid. My favorite trick was at one point in the show someone came to collect some pellets to put in a pot that was supposed to look like it was burning incense... I just reached into the pellet bag and grabbed the pellets and gave them to her. If you kinda juggle them in your hands you can actually keep yourself from getting burnt. We also put pellets in soda, and after we drank the slushies, filled the soda bottles with water, inhaled the vapors (note: Carbon Dioxide is a waste gas of the body, and breathing it in will keep oxygen from entering your body! We had a guy get pretty light-headed after a session of this), and watched as a 7 cm^3 pellet could freeze 100 mL of room temperature water, that's how cold they are. If you have a drink that's lost its fizz, you can actually carbonate it by putting in dry ice, because carbonation is actually carbon dioxide (which dry ice is the frozen form of) dissolved in the liquid. If you want it to stay liquid, though, you should only put in small flakes at a time, as large pellets will cause the drink to freeze around the pellet, or turn into a slushie.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
My dorm made N2 ice cream all the time during rvsh.
One time the kid who was handling the N2 dumped some on the floor to impress the frosh. I got a few droplets in my socks, where it proceeded to burn my skin.
I've never removed a pair of sock so fast.
The dots it left were kind of neat, though, and actually included the texture of the fabric.
Another cool thing we did was put marshmellows in N2. Since there is so much sugar in the marshmellows, they don't get that cold, and you can pop them right in your mouth. They have the texture of a Lucky Charms marshmellow, but are cold, and a lot more fun to eat.
This was a quote of Kurt Vonnegut that didn't fit.
Ice cream is churned for a long time because it breaks down the membrane surrounding the fat globules. By making it in 30 seconds, it's not breaking down the membrane producing just frozen dairy slush.
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