How Silicon Valley Perfected Ice Cream

I don't doubt this is great ice cream, but this is also a superb example of PR at work.

it's a fun gimmick, but "those extra ingredients that make ice cream far from natural" achieve the same thing at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the effort.

also: I haven't looked closely at their formulations, but I'm guessing that they are likely guilty of using a few ingredients in their own ice cream that are also far from natural...

I love good frozen eats, so I can hope hers is good and can be part of a movement that pushes quality at scale so that US ice cream gets to where Europe is (quality at scale and optimal quality with regular availability)... The fawning contextualization and link bait headline - damn you internet.

Ingredients will be limiting factors since some preparations can not / should not be done in the mixing step and post-freeze manhandling of this soft stuff is wasted time - melt is death.

Traditional hard ice cream has a post-mix hard freeze time of 48 hours and some great preparations, like parkerhouse and butter pecan, just wouldn't render well. Not every flavor should turn out like a Dairy Queen Flurry. Not every texture should be mostly indistinguishable from a lumpy frozen custard.

She is perfecting ice crystallization but pawning off the wider challenges of the product. I hope her efforts don't create a limiting view of the cream-based frozen treat experience.

Okay I'll spell it out for the reflexive drive-by downvoters: The ice cream is real ice cream, and crystal size is an orthogonal issue to fat content. I'm not sure what hipsters have to do with it, but I find it a sad reflection on the state of HN that the middle-brow prejudiced dismissal of imagined cultural reasons gets a higher vote than someone pointing out how said dismissal is based on an utter absence of facts.

The "buttery" nature of it could have been the kind of milk that was used -- one consequence of freezing high-fat milk quickly is that the fat will tend to "crash out" of emulsion (this is a side-effect of the same phenomenon that makes the ice crystals smaller). So you'd want to use a leaner mix.

If your teacher used half-and-half or cream, the resulting ice cream was probably pretty fat-forward on the tongue.

(Aside: I've seen this demo done by a bunch of different people, and I'm always a little disappointed by the level of science involved. Usually, it's little more than "See? Liquid nitrogen is REALLY COLD". That's fine, I guess, but there's much more interesting stuff going on!)