‘Enjoy your ice cream before it melts.’
Food Scientists from Japan have rendered this phrase almost unusable anymore by coming up with the never melting ice cream. Wait. WHAT??? No immediate refrigeration required and still being able to devour a scoop of ice cream without it turning to a milkshake. Yes. Sounds truly fascinating, isn’t it? This is one of the most beautiful innovations in Food Science that I have read about and couldn’t wait to share about it with my readers.
Ice cream is like a knight in shining armor on a hot sunny day. It is a boon for the sweet tooth and others alike. It has a creamy texture with an abundance of flavors ranging from vanilla to blueberry to pistachio and so on. However, the way it melts keeps us on the go. The moment you buy it your only purpose is to eat it without letting it melt. So, when this never-melting ice cream was found in Japan it was a huge achievement for the food community. What was more fascinating was that the discovery was accidental.
First of all, let’s go on to why ice cream melts. Ice cream is a solid and like all other solids, it will absorb heat due to heat moving from higher temperatures to lower temperatures. This heat will transform the solid into a liquid. For a general cup of ice cream, the melting point varies according to the composition of the ice cream mix. The melting point of milk is 31 degrees Fahrenheit. With various additions like nuts, cream, sugar, and others, this melting point varies.
Moving on to the discovery of this brilliance, one fine day scientists from the Japan Biotherapy Development Research Centre asked a pastry chef to use strawberries donated by the farmers from Miyagi Prefecture. These strawberry crops were destroyed due to the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, 2011. The strawberries were misshapen and hence unsuitable for sale. So, in a bid to make good use of such a huge lot of strawberries, the scientists hired a pastry chef to make a dessert using the polyphenols extracted from the strawberries in hope of a nutritional dessert. However, what they got sometime later was a frustrated chef who claimed that as soon as the polyphenol extract was added to the dairy-based dessert the whole mixture solidified.
What was frustrating for the chef was a breakthrough for Professor Tomihisa Ota of Japan’s Kanazawa University. The science behind this was that polyphenols in its liquid state keep milk and oil separate. For a dairy-based dessert, this meant that milk and milk fat were kept separate at a temperature when polyphenol was in a liquid state.
However, there is no clear insight into what is internally happening. According to one theory, polyphenols work closely with proteins. The casein and whey proteins in milk hence bind with the added polyphenols forming a protein-polyphenol network. This network forms a gel-like structure capable of trapping water droplets or fat globules. This gel is strong enough to retain its holding properties even at warm temperatures. The ice may melt away, but the structure of the ice cream remains the same. So in other words it is ice cream that melted but in a way not visible to the eye. It may be considered as a foam with a huge number of air bubbles inside the gel structure(2). However, this is just a theory. This ice cream can probably last for as long as 3 hours without melting at room temperatures(6).
This is not the only instant of melt-resistant ice cream. Several other reportings have been made of delayed melting with help of techniques such as incorporating more bubbles during freezing or adding more thickeners. In context with the last article on our blog, 'Food for Astronauts: How is it different from ours?’, Astronaut ice cream is one such space food which despite being made for space probably never made it to space. It is ice cream from which all the water is freeze-dried, packed, and stored as such without any refrigeration.
Despite all of these inventions , what is extremely important is the mouthfeel, taste, and texture of the ice cream. These never-melting icecreams are available in Kananza at only around 4.5$. However, they are only available in Japan right now. So, if you ever visit Japan soon, don’t forget to try these melt-resistant popsicles at Kananza Ice.
Photograph credits : https://hanako.tokyo/shop/14959/
References
1. The Science Behind Why Ice Cream Melts When It's Hot Outside, www.spoonuniversity.com
2. The search for never melting ice cream, www.sciencemeetsfood.com
3. An astronomical myth—astronaut ice cream, www.phys.org
4. The Science Behind the Non-Melting Ice Cream Phenomena, www.thisismold.com
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