Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Fast Food: Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream

When you’re really craving home-made ice cream, it’s no fun waiting the standard 24 hours for the mixture to freeze. You may as well be waiting for hell to freeze over. No worries—scientists with a sweet tooth have come to the rescue with a recipe for nitrogen ice cream that will allow you whip up some of the creamiest ice cream you’ve ever tasted— and it will only take few minutes instead of several hours.

What you’ll need:
1 stainless steel mixing bowl,
1 Wooden mixing spoon,
1 pair of gloves,
1 big sink, or any level place outdoors

What to do:


First of all, how hungry are you? When you decide how much ice cream you want to make, multiply that amount by five. This is the amount of Liquid Nitrogen that you’ll need (so for every gallon of ice cream, you’ll need five gallons of Liquid Nitrogen).

Follow your favorite ice cream recipe, mixing the milk, cream, vanilla, sugar, etc. in your stainless steel bowl. (note: leave your dieting friends at home because artificial sweeteners are not recommended--they may have a funky reaction with the Liquid Nitrogen. Use real sugar).

Once everything is mixed up, put on your gloves, put your bowl in the sink, and slowly pour in the Liquid Nitrogen, mixing with the wooden spoon until frozen to the perfect creamy texture. This should only take about 10 minutes.

Bon Appetite!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi all,
The New York Academy of Sciences just posted a cool podcast on the Experimental Cuisine Collective (http://experimentalcuisine.googlepages.com) in New York, which is an outreach program to make polymer science accessible through the use of food. In the Podcast, Kent Kirschenbaum, one of the founders of the group and a biochemist at NYU, talks some about the chemical creation of ice cream (specifically the Turkish Salepi Dondurma) and the use of Liquid Nitrogen. It’s pretty cool, so I thought it was something everyone on this blog might be interested in.

You can check it out here: http://www.nyas.org/snc/podcastdetail.asp?id=1832