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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

That person consumed actual liquid nitrogen. The cardinal rule of culinary liquid nitrogen: don't ever serve a guest liquid nitrogen.

The nitro-muddling technique in L.I. is designed in multiple stages to prevent that from ever happening; for instance, if you shake a drink with LN still in it, you'll hurt yourself before you manage to serve a guest LN.

You're not wrong, though. You need to know what you're doing or you can hurt people. It's for that reason that we actually didn't play around with the stuff (freezing random stuff and shattering it, for instance); we just followed processes we knew would work.

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I was at a tiki bar last week that served drinks with dry ice in it, with a straw! So, so bad. I don't think you should ever give people dry ice, especially when they've been drinking. But if you did, the theory behind its safety is that it sinks to the bottom, so the drinker couldn't really consume it. But with a straw, if it got to a small enough size you could easily suck a pebble in, and the results would be at best very painful.

Maybe I'm wrong and it's not that dangerous, but I don't think I'd do it if I owned a bar.

I would be worried about this too and if I was to do it, I would make sure it was tied in muslin cloth or similar. Scary.

I feel really dense asking this, but I don't have the faintest idea how the procedures you've mentioned prevent consumption of liquid nitrogen.

When chilling a glass, you dump out the LN. OK. That makes some sense. But then when making ice cream, you put LN directly into the bowl while mixing. Huh?

edit: I can see why you don't want to provide too many details. I will just say this story, while very interesting, terrified me.

If the LN2 is still liquid, then it is boiling. If you had a pocket of LN2 trapped inside the ice cream, it would boil and you would notice your ice cream venting. If the LN2 was still liquid and dispersed throughout the ice cream, then the ice cream would be -196C and you would not be able to eat it.

As long as your food or drink are not spewing off large amounts of gaseous nitrogen, there should be no liquid nitrogen in them.

I have seen stands at local fairs that make LN ice cream to order. It's pretty neat. I haven't done it, but they have 16 year olds doing it presumably without incident.

There is a stand at the Mount Pleasant Farmers Market in Washington, DC, that does LN ice cream. I've never tried it--partly because I don't eat much ice cream, partly because I don't see the point.

It's a better method of freezing than traditional ice cream makers. Faster freeze = smaller ice crystals = creamier mouthfeel.

It's also easier in many ways for them. You don't even have to have freezers, since you're spot freezing everything. It saves you from buying a batch freezer for making it, which is $30,000 used. I'm told that if you're buying LN regularly, the distributor will hook you up with the tank at a low monthly fee. So it's probably much cheaper to start a stand that way.

The downside is it's a little less time-efficient. It's REALLY easy to make a 5 gallon batch of ice cream in a Carpigiani.

The trouble isn't the recipe. The trouble is in people following it, while probably drunk.

Yes. The second cardinal rule: guests don't get to play with LN. Three people at our party were allowed to handle it. I mention this in the post, under "isolation".

Did those three drink anything?

No, but they were definitely tripping balls on 2C-T.

Well, that response was unexpected.

Sorry for getting my safety hat on, am not meaning to rain on your parade. I think this is really cool and want to try it too.

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