Ice Cream Essay

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On a hot summer day, there is no better sound than a big white truck holding sugary goodness driving down the street. The tune rings as the children chase it to a stop. You wait hastily in line to give your order. Then you see it; the perfect cone. The scoops sits on a cone, cloaked in a rainbow of sprinkles, you get prepared to eat it. What you aren’t thinking about is what goes into making such an amazing piece of deliciousness. This cool treat needs a lot of science in order to make it.
Ice cream is made using a mixture of cream and milk, sugar, eggs, and other ingredients. The ice cream starts off with heavy cream, condensed skim milk, and liquid sugar cane. Then yolks, cocoa powder (for chocolate flavors), vanilla extract and natural stabilizers are added, which prevents the formation of ice crystals. All of the ingredients are mixed for six to eight minutes, resulting in a white “sweet cream” mix or a chocolate mix. The completed batch of mix is then transferred through one of the two strainers into the surge tank. The surge tank is where the mix is stored until it is ready to begin the pasteurization process.
The pasteurization process is when the mix is heated in order to kill the bacteria. For commercial ice creams, it is important for the base to be heated up to the right temperature so that the bacteria in the eggs are killed. The pasteurizer is made up of a series of very stainless steel plates. Hot water of 180 degrees flows on one side of the plates and the cold mix (36 degrees) is pumped through on the other sides of the plates. In an industrial setting, batch pasteurization can be used; the base is heated to 150 degrees Fahrenheit. It is then kept in the container for thirty minutes. Afterwards it is reheated ...

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... In an industrial production, the water and fat and forced through a narrow slit at high pressure, breaking the fat droplets and dispersing them. The size is usually less than one thousandth of a millimeter. The mixed is pumped into the tank room, which is at 36 degrees and is there for four to eight hours. Afterwards the mix is pumped to the flavor tank, where a tank holding 500 gallons of ice cream is transformed into ice cream with different flavors.
The ice cream also needs time to mature after the pasteurization process and the added flavors. Chemical ingredients such as proteins, emulsifiers, fat molecules, any flavors are settled making the ice cream smoother. The ageing time can be anywhere from 4 to 24 hours. In the commercial production, the ice cream base is cooled down quickly to 5 degrees Celsius, and kept at this temperature for a couple of hours.

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