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Edible Antifreeze For Smoother Ice Cream
holy_calamity writes "Proteins extracted from gelatin can dramatically improve the quality of ice cream by preventing the growth of ice crystals that ruin its texture. Perfect smooth ice cream has ice crystals around 20 microns in size, but slight thawing and refreezing makes them grow and ruins the mouth feel, making it gritty. The new proteins are similar to those in the blood of the snow flea, an insect able to keep active in sub-zero temperatures." Here are the abstract and the full article as published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
The new proteins are similar to those in the blood of the snow flea,...
Oh now that sounds delicious! Snow Flea Blood Ice Cream.
Thank you, Slashdot, for making me not able to eat Ice Cream today.
*wink*
C//
Ok,
/. for STDOUT now?
Who is the joker that tagged this as inputdev? Am I going to get in trouble at work for searching
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
I *love* those little ice particles in ice cream, they give it a great texture. Game over.
== Jez ==
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with your headline, you pass science, but you flunk marketing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I like the "gritty" feel of those larger ice crystals, especially in sherbet.
Maybe I'm weird, but completely smooth ice cream almost tastes like it's melting... Not that it's bad, but I like the variety.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Just genetically modify the cow to produce this protein in the milk and you have the perfect production process.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I assure you that almost no "ice cream" is actually vegan, because it has CREAM (i.e., from milk) in it. So the addition of this gelatin-extract does not change its status as vegan or non-vegan.
However, !vegetarian would make sense, since gelatin is made from the animal itself, and ice cream does not generally contain any animal parts (as far as I know!).
p.s. FWIW, I eat animals myself, but think gelatin (ground horse hooves) is kinda gross.
Now we can have ice cream that's been thawed and frozen after a meal of 'fresh' chicken that's been frozen and thawed.
In my day, if we wanted smooth ice cream, we had to mix in ethylene glycol by hand with a leaden spoon! and we were grateful! You kids get off my lawn!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
the growth of ice crystals that ruin its texture
Or, you could just eat Gelato, and avoid this problem altogether.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
What's next flounder genes in tomatoes to keep them from freezing? Flouresence genes in pigs so they glow under black light? Oh, wait..
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Companies could just make ice cream properly and transport and store it well and not put so much chemical crap into it, but hey then it might cut into their 1500% profit margins.
I've always just used car anti-freeze in my ice cream. It's an acquired taste, but it is really delicious!
Wow - all that science and research done by an actual food chemist proven wrong by a single ridiculous assertion by Slashdot's most famous member, Anonymous Coward!
The Chinese are getting into the ice cream industry?
Real ice cream is made from cream which is expensive. Real Ice Cream maintains it's texture because it's mostly milk fat with very little water. The point is to take milk and cheaper water based products and still get that higher quality texture. This is about saving a buck not producing a higher quality ice cream.
It doesn't look fine to me. The soybean oil and soybean-derived mono- and diglycerides put me in bed for 2-3 days when I eat it. What's worse is that manufacturers have been lobbying the FDA to not have to itemize ingredients, particularly soy-derived ingredients.
Bring back real ice cream, please!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
This is about maintaining quality in ice cream. As someone else pointed out, most of the heat shock (melting/refreezing) that occurs in ice cream is on your drive home and in your freezer at home. After freezing under agitation, only about half of the water content of the ice cream base is frozen, but the number of ice nuclei is the highest it will ever be. Under second stage quiescent freezing these crystals just get larger as the percentage of liquid water approaches zero. All temperature fluctuations above about -20F contribute to the degradation of these ice crystals into larger crystals. All of the solids in the base help inhibit this process, especially stabilizers such as locust bean gum and guar gum.
These anti-freeze proteins serve a similar purpose to traditional stabilizers. Ice Cream is not a high profit margin industry, and any advances in maintaining quality are good overall.
I was allergic to wheat, soy, rye, sulphides, nitrates, and probably a bunch of stuff I can't remember. Oh, right, cockroaches. Eating any of these things would result in migraines so painful that I'd throw up from the pain, and would go blind during the intitial stages of the migraine. I would have these migraines up to three times a week, and they could sometimes last days. I wasn't actually aware that I had allergies.
After a blood test, I went on a desensitisation program, wherein I didn't eat any of the above (very hard, seeing as sulphides+nitrates include everything with flavour. I basically lived on rice...) for about a year, while taking drops under my tongue. I'd go in for blood tests every three months or so, I think, and could slowly start eating these things again.
Now, I can eat what I want. The process was expensive, but I think well worth it. For a year of bland food, I got my life back.
Ezekiel 23:20