Ice cream: In detail

Many think that ice cream is made up of a few simple ingredients, such as milk, cream, eggs and sugar. But, reading the ingredients of ice cream etiquette, even an artisan one, you will discover endless lists, with plenty of unsuspected ingredients. Let's see them one by one trying to understand their function, without having to go too much into the technical details.

Peanut Ice cream

Air

To understand how air is an important ingredient in the production of ice cream, try to take a tray of industrial ice cream, and leave it at room temperature: once melted, it will only fill half the tray, indicating that the ice cream, before melting , trapped a considerable amount of air, which was then released during the melting.

Air is a fundamental characteristic for obtaining quality ice cream: it gives lightness to the ice cream and makes it soft, decreasing and making the perception of cold acceptable. The air is incorporated into the ice cream during the first phase of the freezing: the air globules remain trapped between the ice crystals in formation and the other molecules that make up the mixture. When the temperature drops below -2 degrees, the crystal formation phase becomes very rapid and it is no longer possible to incorporate air.

From a qualitative point of view, it is important that the air cells are small and well distributed within the mass, to achieve this result, both the characteristics of the batch freezer and the ingredients of the mixture, some of which favour the incorporation of air, while others hinder it.

Water

Usually contained only in its raw form in sorbets, it is naturally contained in milk (about 88%), cream (about 59%) and fruit (about 90%). Water forms ice crystals during the formation of ice cream and the smaller we can  keep the ice crystals inside the ice cream mixture while freezing, the more beautifully soft and smooth the end result will be.

Miso ice cream with banana cake and miso caramel

Milk and cream

Milk supplies ice cream with proteins, some of the fats and also a little sugar. By itself, and in the vast majority of cases, milk cannot provide all the proteins and fats that ice cream needs. Cream (made from milk fats) is used to supplement fats, while the so-called "lean milk" is used to supplement proteins.

Sugar

Sugar in ice cream has two functions: sweetener and antifreeze. Dextrose has an anti-freezing power superior to sucrose: therefore a mixture of water and sucrose freezes at a higher temperature than a mixture with the same proportions of water and dextrose. The freezing point is important in ice cream because it will vary the consistency characteristics and ideally must remain within an optimal range. The sugar most used in ice cream is sucrose, cooking sugar, this can be integrated with other sugars (dextrose, invert sugar, glucose, fructose ...) to vary, within certain limits, the anti-freezing power and the sweetness of the ice cream.

Eggs

Eggs are used only in the flavours that need their presence, therefore in the flavours of cream, Eggnog, English soup, Mascarpone, Tiramisu, Creme caramel, etc. Eggs, or yolks, can be fresh, pasteurised or powdered. Fresh eggs guarantee the highest quality, but the least practicality: they take up a lot of space, they must be shelled by hand and the mixture obtained must be pasteurised anyway. Pre-pasteurised eggs are already packed in cartons so you can just empty them in the mixer. Even if the pasteurisation makes you lose something in terms of taste. Powdered eggs have a completely altered taste and certainly do not allow to obtain a high quality ice cream.