Ice cream seems like a simple concept: take cream or milk and make it cold enough to freeze. But in reality this frozen treat we know and love is one of the most complex food products available. Ice cream consists of finely balanced ingredients co-existing as a metastable mixture of three different states of matter – solid, liquid and gas – held at specific temperatures from manufacture, through transport and display, all the way to consumption.
A product that is not too firm, not too soft, with the right balance of sweetness, and a smooth, creamy mouthfeel. Delicious – I’m getting hungry already! But there’s a lot of chemistry going on in a single scoop.
The incremental origins that led to modern ice cream are spaced across hundreds of years, and range from myths of Mongolian horsemen galloping through the frozen tundra with bladders of slowly freezing cream; the first use of whipping while freezing
