Edible Antifreeze For Smoother Ice Cream

holy_calamity writes "Proteins extracted from gelatin can dramatically improve the quality of ice cream by preventing the growth of ice crystals that ruin its texture. Perfect smooth ice cream has ice crystals around 20 microns in size, but slight thawing and refreezing makes them grow and ruins the mouth feel, making it gritty. The new proteins are similar to those in the blood of the snow flea, an insect able to keep active in sub-zero temperatures." Here are the abstract and the full article as published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Re:Mmm, Delicious

[Anonymous Coward]

Please STOP killing and disfiguring and horrible-izing my ice-cream (OK - some the words maybe in-appropriate in the context, but you get the idea). I just want a simple ice cream with real milk and not a "high fructose corn syrup, this sure isn't milk or cream but our just goo made to look like it" crap.

Just check out the ingredients of any modern ice-cream and the you'll see what I mean.

When I was younger, we made it at home from real milk, sugar and a bit of flavoring agent in a hand-turned ice-cream maker and it was yuumm. Very different from the goo they sell today

The same holds for about all the things (at least foodstuffs). Oh, well - so much for progress ...

Gelato

[mcpkaaos]

the growth of ice crystals that ruin its texture

Or, you could just eat Gelato, and avoid this problem altogether.

We don't need this

[DaveCBio]

Companies could just make ice cream properly and transport and store it well and not put so much chemical crap into it, but hey then it might cut into their 1500% profit margins.

Re:Wrong -- galactose not ice crystals = grittines

[Scaba]

Wow - all that science and research done by an actual food chemist proven wrong by a single ridiculous assertion by Slashdot's most famous member, Anonymous Coward!

Re:Mmm, Delicious

[Naughty Bob]

In the olden days, if they'd have discovered that some olden day ingredient (bat grease, shark lung etc...) made your ice cream all smooth, I bet they'd have used it in a second. It would now be an accepted part of 'good old ice cream'.

What I'm saying is that new technology need not necessarily be bad. This stuff might be good. Agree with you about most modern ice cream though. The swine.

Re:!vegan tag

[riseoftheindividual]

Isn't the ! a not operator? As in !vegan = NOT Vegan, thus !vegan != vegan.

That's what I thought anyway. Otherwise, what the hell is the point of the exclamation mark in the beginning?

Everyone is missing the point

[edwardpickman]

Real ice cream is made from cream which is expensive. Real Ice Cream maintains it's texture because it's mostly milk fat with very little water. The point is to take milk and cheaper water based products and still get that higher quality texture. This is about saving a buck not producing a higher quality ice cream.

Re:Looks fine to me

[kimvette]

It doesn't look fine to me. The soybean oil and soybean-derived mono- and diglycerides put me in bed for 2-3 days when I eat it. What's worse is that manufacturers have been lobbying the FDA to not have to itemize ingredients, particularly soy-derived ingredients.

Bring back real ice cream, please!

Re:Mmm, Delicious

[fbjon]

There's plenty of good ice cream, it's just not the cheapest/most popular stuff.

This isn't about making cheaper ice cream...

[lordhades]

This is about maintaining quality in ice cream. As someone else pointed out, most of the heat shock (melting/refreezing) that occurs in ice cream is on your drive home and in your freezer at home. After freezing under agitation, only about half of the water content of the ice cream base is frozen, but the number of ice nuclei is the highest it will ever be. Under second stage quiescent freezing these crystals just get larger as the percentage of liquid water approaches zero. All temperature fluctuations above about -20F contribute to the degradation of these ice crystals into larger crystals. All of the solids in the base help inhibit this process, especially stabilizers such as locust bean gum and guar gum.
These anti-freeze proteins serve a similar purpose to traditional stabilizers. Ice Cream is not a high profit margin industry, and any advances in maintaining quality are good overall.

Re:Mmm, Delicious

[jlarocco]

Real tastes so much better, I only comprehend why they sell the other stuff because they're all cheap bastards.

No, the people buying ice cream are cheap bastards. The ice cream companies don't give a shit either way, they produce what sells. This is an example of people "voting with their wallet".

If you think "traditional" ice cream is that much better, there's nothing stopping you from starting your own ice cream company.

Re:Mmm, Delicious

[rtb61]

Of course the benefit with that, is all the idiots who ate (bat grease, shark lung etc...) would be long dead and they would not be experimenting on us. The modern era is not driven by quality, it is driven by greed, addictive, cheap ingredients and bugger the medium or long term consequences. How ever many die or suffer makes no differences as long as some corporate ass hat can walks away with a ton of profits now and they will grease as many political hands as they need to get away with it.

Perhaps a more modern test for new ingredients might be to feed them to corporate executives, leading share holders, politicians and their families for several years before the ass hats tried to mislabel it and sneak it into our foods.