“Kring-kring, Finding Some Science in Ice Cream!”
Do you remember when you were playing outside with your friends and then you suddenly heard that *kring-kring* sound? Do you remember how fast you get to your mother to ask for some coins? Or the moment where in you struggle on choosing the best flavor because all of it is your favorite. We can never deny the fact that at this generation, people at any age, junior or senior, still love the sweetness of ice cream.
Food historians tell that the history of ice cream originated with flavored ice or snow. Ancient Greeks ate snow mixed with honey and fruits, Chinese mixed snow with milk and rice, and many more variations of flavors that have been added to a snow or ice to produce chilled delicacies. As generation passes, the recipe for ice cream has been innovated to different taste and flavor. Before, we only have few flavors (fruity, creamy or just sweet), now; we have over a hundred and twenty flavors of ice cream that are widely spread all over the globe.
Finding science in Ice Cream, looking at this logically, an ice cream is actually quite a complex and multi-faceted composition. It ought to be solid, yet liquid. The purpose behind the fragile nature of ice cream is at a matter of food chemistry.
Most ice creams consist of a frozen emulsion of five basic components; Ice Crystals, Fats, Sweeteners, Air and Other Solids. Ice crystals are needed in order to make the ice cream solid and have body.
Fats in the form of milk fat are also needed to add richness, to improve density, make the texture smooth and to increase flavors.
Sweeteners are generally sugars, honey or syrup not only for the sweetness but also to improve the texture and the body of the ice cream. Sweeteners also lower the freezing point of the mixture giving you a semi-solid product.
The Air is the cheapest ingredient of the ice cream and is responsible for the consistency of the ice cream. It makes up anywhere from 30% to 50% of the total volume of ice cream. The amount of air added to ice cream is known as overrun. The effect of adding more air to the ice cream makes it melt quickly. In ice cream, liquid particles of fat—called fat globules—are spread throughout a mixture of water, sugar, and ice, along with air bubbles.
Other solids, such as salts, proteins, milk solids and flavorings like cookies, nuts, fruits slices and others, contributes not only flavors but also texture and smoothness of the ice cream. Putting all of these together makes ice cream but of course, it runs into processes.
Ice cream is an emulsion - the process of combining different substances which under normal circumstances would separate from each other and instead turn them into a smooth, lightly thickened mixture- or the Ice Cream base. Fat droplets that are present in the mixture would separate because fat droplets interact with one another, a process called coalescence.
Each of the droplets are coated with a layer of milk proteins that serves as “emulsifiers” substances that stabilize emulsions and allow the liquid droplets present in the emulsion to remain dispersed, instead of clumping together. A common emulsifier is lecithin, found in egg yolks.
Stabilizers likewise improve the structure, but also the texture of ice cream. It also reduces the melting speed of it. A traditionally well-known stabilizer for ice cream, also readily available for home production is Gelatin.
Ice Cream making have five basic steps
Preparation of the Ice Cream Base, for a typical balanced proportions for the base would be around 60% of water (including the water you’ll find in milk and cream), about 15 % sugar, about 10 % non-fat milk content, and somewhere between 10-20 % milk-fat content.
Pasteurization Process – for a dairy industry, this process is one of the most important processes of all. This process is done by heating the base to kill bacteria to make the ice cream safer to eat.
Homogenization- basically the separating of, and better scattering of, fat beads with a specific end goal to improve the emulsion of fat into the ice cream base (avoiding that the water and the fat in the ice cream discrete).
Ageing / Maturing - maturing permits the myriads of each fat bead to partially solidify and have their surface covered by proteins.
And lastly, the freezing of ice cream;
When ice cream touches the roof of your mouth, it may trigger a cold headache. The cause is a dilation of blood vessels in your head located above the roof of your mouth. When this nerve center gets cold, it seems to overreact and tries to heat your brain.
http://www.ice-cream-showcase.com/ice-cream/ice-cream-and-gelato.html
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/resources/highschool/chemmatters/past-issues/archive-2013-2014/ice-cream-chemistry.html
http://www.icecreamnation.org/science-of-ice-cream
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTte0H8OhvQ
http://www.idfa.org/news-views/media-kits/ice-cream/the-history-of-ice-cream
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream
