How Silicon Valley Perfected Ice Cream | Hacker News Reader

How Silicon Valley Perfected Ice Cream

wired.com

32 pointsnavpan21 comments

"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.

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

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.

"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.

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?

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_gastronomy

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.

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

I assume the OP has never been to europe.

Exactly my thought. On top of my head:

http://www.berthillon.fr/ http://www.grom.it/

A matter of taste?

I love good frozen eats, so I can hope hers is good and can be part of a movement that pushes quality at scale so that US ice cream gets to where Europe is (quality at scale and optimal quality with regular availability)... The fawning contextualization and link bait headline - damn you internet.

Ingredients will be limiting factors since some preparations can not / should not be done in the mixing step and post-freeze manhandling of this soft stuff is wasted time - melt is death.

Traditional hard ice cream has a post-mix hard freeze time of 48 hours and some great preparations, like parkerhouse and butter pecan, just wouldn't render well. Not every flavor should turn out like a Dairy Queen Flurry. Not every texture should be mostly indistinguishable from a lumpy frozen custard.

She is perfecting ice crystallization but pawning off the wider challenges of the product. I hope her efforts don't create a limiting view of the cream-based frozen treat experience.

Might want to take a look at 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.

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.

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

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

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!)

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.

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

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.

http://foundation.bz/28/

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com