It looks, at first, like either a brilliant demonstration of food styling, or perhaps just some really good Photoshop work. Surely a frozen treat isn’t floating, unmelting, in a mug of hot chocolate. And you can’t light some soft serve on fire in the real world!
Right?
But you can, and it’s not fake ice cream or photo-editing wizardry. Instead, some Japanese scientists have found a chemical in strawberries that allow ice cream to hold its shape for half an hour, even under the nastiest summer sun.
To understand how it works, you need to understand ice cream. Ice cream is an emulsion. That is, tiny droplets of one liquid dispersed throughout another one. In this case, it’s milk fats through water. Think of a bottle of salad dressing that separates, and you have to shake it up to mix it together. Once you have that emulsion, you mix in some air, creating a foam, and freeze it so the fats and the water don’t separate, locking in the air. When the outside of that foam stops holding, i.e. when the ice in the mix melts, the air is released and the two come apart, getting your hand sticky.
The strawberries come in with a polyphenol accidentally uncovered by researchers at Kanazawa University. Polyphenols are nature’s glue; they’re very good at binding certain things together. In this case, it turns out strawberry polyphenols are pretty good at making it harder for lipids (milk fats) and water to break up. So, while the ice cream is technically getting warmer, it loses less of its shape and doesn’t separate nearly as quickly.
It will eventually melt, it will just take thirty minutes or so to do so, which allows achievements like unmeltable soft serve and “ice cream fondue.” For what it’s worth, there’s no strawberry taste, but those who eat it do report a faint strawberry scent. It’s not particularly costly, either, as a cone will run you about $3.50.
The main question, of course, is whether this can make it to the US during the summer, and we sure hope so. Sure, a vanishing ice cream cone is a minor bummer in the scheme of things, but on a hot day, having one around just that bit longer may be the boost 2018 needs.
(via Food & Wine)
