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Comment by holowoodman | Hacker News Reader

The best ice cream recipe ever I got from a physicist:

Cream + sugar + vanilla, stir until dissolved. Slowly add liquid nitrogen while stirring fervently until sufficiently frozen.

The stirring in of the liquid nitrogen not only freezes the cream, it prevents any cristallisation and fluffs up the ice cream by evaporating. Truly delicious!

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Where do you get liquid nitrogen as a home cook? I’ve tried to get my hands on both that and dry ice without any luck

I know in upstate New York the only option is to hope there's a gas supplier‡ relatively close or try ordering it online.

‡: like this: https://noblegassolutions.com/

if you have LN2, you can add high spirits as well - bitter/sweet liquors are a classic in that combo.

You can add too much liquor and it will still freeze nicely. Spiced rum was pretty good.

The fat content seems too high. Don't you get a film of fat covering the top of you mouth?

Depends on the cream you use. But basically it doesn't really matter, you can also use milk, even skimmed milk. Any liquid icecream-mix works, only chunky stuff is problematic.

One time in grad school we used liquid argon that was going to boil off. Since argon is heavier than Alex the ice cream had a very interesting bubbly consistency.

> argon is heavier than Alex ..

Al(ex)chemy is so counter intuitive and suprising!

Hah. (Supposed to be air, if not obvious. DYAC).

Call me slow but I still do not get the "Alex". Alchemy?

Pretty much, it was weak at best, cozzyd seemed amused which was the intent, we all make mistakes and typo'ing Alex rather than air was worth a mild poke.

I can confirm that this works and is delicious.

How much of each?

Just look up any ice cream recipe. Doesn't really matter.

I've used 1l of plain cream, 100g of sugar and the marrow of 1 1/2 vanilla pods.

Add sugar to taste, while liquid. IMO you can never add too much vanilla.

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