The quest to make an ice cream that doesn't melt
Few things delight on a summer day like an ice cream cone. Few things cause such despair, however, like the total disintegration of said ice cream, running down one's fingers, sagging from the cone, heading earthwards before you can say "toddler meltdown".
Any number of rhapsodies could be written about the pleasures of something so short-lived, all the sweeter for their brevity. But you would have to go to another story to find them, because here we will not tolerate such masochism.
Reports of Japanese manufacturer Kanazawa Ice's ice pops, and, later on, soft-serve ice cream, withstanding numerous heat-based assaults without melting, went viral some years ago, however. The scientists behind this ice cream had pumped it full of polyphenols, a class of antioxidant molecules found in many fruits. The result was a curious stability, a notable lack of creamy liquid running over fingers. How did it work?
Ice cream is composed primarily of cream and sugar. Machines for producing the stuff churn the sweet slurry in a refrigerated drum, and when it forms a frozen film on the drum's interior, a scraper chips it off. This keeps the ice crystals from growing to a distasteful size, the phenomenon behind the slightly jagged texture of some ice cream when you bring it home from the grocery store.
