

How Silicon Valley Perfected Ice Cream - navpan
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/06/the-blue-bottle-of-ice-cream/

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timr
_" Freezing speed is correlated with freezing temperature. So if you can
freeze it really, really cold, you can get smaller ice crystals. And if you
can freeze really cold, you can freeze really fast. The benefit of that is if
you make small enough batches you can freeze to order. Therefore you don’t
need any of those extra ingredients that make ice cream far from natural."_

You know what else works for that? Fat. It's why iced custard is smoother than
philadelphia ice cream. It's also much easier and more manageable than using
liquid nitrogen, but, you know...you can't sell regular ice cream to hipsters
at a massive markup.

That's it...I'm opening an easy-bake oven bakery in Hayes Valley. After all,
cooking with lightbulbs is slower, and therefore, more love goes into each
cookie.

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dasil003
Your dismissive snark is fail. What makes you think there's no fat in her ice
cream?

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dasil003
Okay I'll spell it out for the reflexive drive-by downvoters: The ice cream
_is_ real ice cream, and crystal size is an orthogonal issue to fat content.
I'm not sure what hipsters have to do with it, but I find it a sad reflection
on the state of HN that the middle-brow prejudiced dismissal of imagined
cultural reasons gets a higher vote than someone pointing out how said
dismissal is based on an utter absence of facts.

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timr
_" The ice cream is real ice cream, and crystal size is an orthogonal issue to
fat content."_

I never claimed the ice cream wasn't "real", and crystal size is correlated to
fat content: the higher the fat content, the smaller the crystals. Liquid
nitrogen is a gimmicky method of accomplishing something that is already done
in simpler ways.

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dasil003
So given a maximally (because there is obviously a limit before it becomes
gross right?) high fat ice cream, you are claiming it won't have smaller ice
crystals using liquid nitrogen compared to traditional methods?

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subsystem
They might have popularized it or invented the machine, but the technique is
at least 20 years old.

1994:
[http://www.nhn.ou.edu/~johnson/Education/SeeS_SZ/Chemistry_o...](http://www.nhn.ou.edu/~johnson/Education/SeeS_SZ/Chemistry_of_Cooking/Supplemental/2004_Sciam-
KitchenPhysics.pdf)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_gastronomy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_gastronomy)

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johnyzee
The Discovery series about food chemistry had a segment about using liquid
nitrogen to make ice cream. I think they concluded that it is the perfect way
to make ice cream.

The show had many other very interesting segments (like how to make mashed
potato that doesn't turn into glue) with all the chemical backgrounds for
great foods. It is fascinating stuff.

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antr
I don't doubt this is great ice cream, but this is also a superb example of PR
at work.

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marban
I assume the OP has never been to europe.

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shin_lao
Exactly my thought. On top of my head:

[http://www.berthillon.fr/](http://www.berthillon.fr/)
[http://www.grom.it/](http://www.grom.it/)

A matter of taste?

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jejones3141
Might want to take a look at
[http://www.blueskycreamery.com/](http://www.blueskycreamery.com/) where
they've been freezing ice cream with liquid nitrogen in large quantities
(rather than the tiny spheres of Dippin' Dots) for a long time; the two
founders came up with the process when they were Iowa State students back in
1999.

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nakedrobot2
Graeter's perfected ice cream decades ago. It's not techy or Silicon Valley or
in Wired but it is definitely the best. There is no need to look further.
Anyone else claiming ice cream perfection is a charlatan.

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girvo
We did this in highschool. Tasted amazing, the texture was perfect!

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yardie
We did as well. Tasted a bit buttery and I don't think we had enough vanilla
extract.

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timr
The "buttery" nature of it could have been the kind of milk that was used --
one consequence of freezing high-fat milk quickly is that the fat will tend to
"crash out" of emulsion (this is a side-effect of the same phenomenon that
makes the ice crystals smaller). So you'd want to use a leaner mix.

If your teacher used half-and-half or cream, the resulting ice cream was
probably pretty fat-forward on the tongue.

(Aside: I've seen this demo done by a bunch of different people, and I'm
always a little disappointed by the level of science involved. Usually, it's
little more than _" See? Liquid nitrogen is REALLY COLD"_. That's fine, I
guess, but there's much more interesting stuff going on!)

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vampirechicken
I'm not jealous of San Fransisco. We've got Mardi Gras, Jeni's Splend, and
Graeters within walking or driving distance. Columbus, OH is where the ice
cream is.

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dpdawson
Dinner (dinnerbyheston.com) has a similar machine. I know it was custom built.
I wonder if there is some connection.

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peterstjohn
Heston has been doing nitro ice-cream for at least a decade at this point -
it's a fairly common technique in higher-end restaurants.

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fourstar
[http://foundation.bz/28/](http://foundation.bz/28/)

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timdellinger
it's a fun gimmick, but "those extra ingredients that make ice cream far from
natural" achieve the same thing at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of
the effort.

also: I haven't looked closely at their formulations, but I'm guessing that
they are likely guilty of using a few ingredients in their own ice cream that
are also far from natural...

