Maybe I am going crazy, but I have noticed a difference about ice cream and its only been Maybe the last 8-10 years was when I first noticed it.
Ice cream from the supermarket doesn’t seem to melt properly, and is also way too soft. This seems most noticeable in novelties now, but also most hard ice cream as well.
Did they add some component to make it softer or less likely to freezer burn? Am I just going crazy?
(US, but I assume anywhere else where the same brands are sold have had the same issue.)
One thing most have done is incorporate more air, as part of shrinkflation. That makes it more soft because it’s less actual product.
Yep. Cause they sell per volume, not weight
Yep - overrun.
You see this mostly in cheaper brands.
Gums like guar and xanth. In small amounts they make ice cream better and help keep ice crystals small. I use them in my homemade ice cream.
Used in larger amounts they replace fat at the cost of taste and mouth feel. That’s what makes the ice cream stay a gel at room temp.
Yes on both accounts. It is frozen whipped topping. It had enough air to hold its shape when it melts.
Its 50% air now. Costs the same price but half the cost u manufacture cos it half air. Good ol shrinkflation.
Make sure the words Ice Cream are on the container, otherwise it is only a frozen dairy dessert. You will be surprised how many are not really ice cream.
More fillers, less milk, less actual sugar, and no egg.
A trick I learned how to find better quality ice cream is to compare the weights on same liquid ounce packages. The one that weighs more will be the one with more real food ingredients and less artificial shit like fillers, emulsifiers, flavors and other additives.
Price can also be an indicator; cheap ice cream is almost always crappy ice cream.
They also are just always trying to figure out how to trap more air in the ice cream, so that reduces the weight too.
This is called overrun and is the main way you get shorted on product. More overrun means a creamier feeling product, but it also means you get less. So there’s that.
They started using stabilizers in cheap ice cream a while back. That helps it have the fluffy texture you expect even though it doesn’t have nearly enough fat to churn up nicely by itself.
Buy expensive ice cream with a higher fat content (more cream content and or egg yolks,) it’s worth the extra money.
Also it helps to bring an insulated freezer bag when you go to the store, the melt and refreeze between the store freezer and home does unpleasant things to ice cream texture. If you’ve ever had icy or hard ice cream it has probably melted at some point during transit before refreezing.
Edit: if you feel like microdosing ice cream facts today here’s a treat from 18y ago: https://archive.ph/2012.09.09-004911/http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/26/dining/26cream.html?_r=1. Cheap ice cream is a pretty heavily engineered food at this point.
You aren’t imagining it, they add various types of gum and additives to slow melting rates of real ice cream, and a lot of ice cream is straight up fake - “frozen dairy dessert” is a euphemism for fake ice cream often padded out with cheaper ingredients like vegetable oils.
https://www.foodandwine.com/drumstick-ice-cream-doesnt-melt-tiktok-8635415
Honestly now-a-days one of the few ways we are going to protect ourselves is to rely on the ingredients list our governments mandate and familiarize ourselves with what products are actually what they claim they are, whether they contain anything questionable, and what euphemisms they use to hide undesirable ingredients. (Hydrogenated Oil ==
TransSaturated Fat, Natural Sweeteners == Sugar, Corn Syrup == cheap substitute for sugar)For those of us in the US (yes I know this is world - sorry) we can only hope the brain worm dead bear boy doesn’t gut the FDA as badly as he promises, or companies are going to start adding all sorts of fun stuff to our food.
Educate yourself and your friends about “the poison squad”, fascinating story of the kinds of crazy shit they used to put in food. Copper sulfate in canned peas and such.
Hydrogenated Oil == Trans Fat
Just as a point of chemistry clarity, partially hydrogenated oils contain trans fat, fully hydrogenated oils do not. Partially hydrogenated oils are no longer GRAS by the FDA and shouldn’t be in any commercially sold foods, except the amount that occurs naturally in foods like butter.
Fully hydrogenated oils still have saturated fat so it’s not like it’s healthy, but it’s not as bad as trans fat.
TIL - Thank you!
Another NoStupidQuestion, what are trans and saturated fats anyway?
Alton Brown’s Good Eats explains fats
The Mayo Clinic has a good overview here that explains about the different types of fats
There’s no chemistry in that article
As someone who’s just spent half an hour reading Wikipedia thanks to this thread, I can now dispense a summary of what I read to make it feel like I didn’t just waste a chunk of time I should have spent in bed by wasting another chunk of time I should be spending in bed.
Fats are made out of fatty acids, which are carboxylic acids with a longish carbon chain. A saturated fatty acid only has single bonds between carbon atoms, a monounsaturated fatty acid has a single double bond somewhere in the chain (and these are sometimes things that turn into buzzwords, e.g. omega three oils are ones where there’s a single double bond three along from the end of the chain), and a polyunsaturated fatty acid has more than one double bond.
Single bonds in a carbon chain can only be one way around, so you don’t get isomers of saturated fatty acids, but double bonds in a carbon chain can be in either of two orientations. If the hydrogens are on the same side for both sides of the bond, that’s the cis orientation, and if they’re on opposite sides, that’s the trans orientation. Most natural unsaturated fats are cis, so they generally don’t get explicitly labelled as cis fats, and just the trans ones get the extra label. Notably, though, vaccenic acid, which is about 4% of the fat in butter, is trans by default, so it’s cis-vaccenic acid that gets the extra label.
Unsaturated fats tend to be more liquid at room temperature, but can be made by growing cheap vegetables. They also go off faster as free radicals can attack the double bonds. Saturated fats tend to be solid at room temperature, but mostly need to come from animals or more expensive plants (palm fat is an exception - it’s cheap and mostly saturated). It’s therefore desirable to use industrial processes to artificially saturate fats, and we can do that by heating them up and exposing them to hydrogen in the presence of a catalyst like Nickel. You don’t necessarily want to fully saturate your fat, though, so might stop part way, and if you do, unless you intentionally tweak the process to avoid it because it’s the 21st century and you’re legally obliged to, you get some of the partially hydrogenated fat switching from cis to trans.
Over the course of the last century, we realised that (except for a few like vaccenic acid) trans fats are harmful in lots of exciting ways, e.g. messing up cholesterol, blocking your arteries, and building up in your brain. They’ve therefore been banned or restricted to certain percentages in a lot of the world. You can get a similar effect by fully hydrogenating things to get safe (or at least safer) saturated fat and mixing it with the unmodified fat, or by switching everything that used to use hydrogenated vegetable oil to using palm oil, which is one of the driving forces behind turning rainforests into palm plantations.
Apparently, this was twenty five minutes of writing, so I’m nearly up to an hour of thinking about fats.
Saturated fats are okay kinda
Trans fats never leave your body. They’re unbelievably delicious but horrid for you.
I mean if they gut the regulatory agencies the companies will probably just remove the ingredient list altogether
Yep, hoping he’s not stupid enough to do that. However, on the other hand brain worms…
For those of us in the US (yes I know this is world - sorry) we can only hope the brain worm dead bear boy doesn’t gut the FDA as badly as he promises, or companies are going to start adding all sorts of fun stuff to our food.
Educate yourself and your friends about “the poison squad”, fascinating story of the kinds of crazy shit they used to put in food. Copper sulfate in canned peas and such.
Oh, Jesus. I’m autistic and rely on safe foods, I can’t wait for them to start killing me now
Cook meals at home when possible. You’re not the only one that doesn’t like what corporations do to food, autistic or not.
I’m going to start making my fries from potatoes that I will grow inside, although part of that is also just to save money on groceries
Okay, after some research, I found out potatoes don’t grow well indoors and growing them indoors ends up being more expensive than just buying potatoes, but I know how to make fries from scratch, so that’s still better and cheaper than using oven fries or ordering fast food
That’s really awesome. Respect.
Yea, I make my own ice cream, because, well, really it’s something we shouldn’t be eating a lot of in the first place (mostly the sugar, but there’s also this double-whammy to glycemic response when a lot of sugar is consumed with a lot of fat - ice cream).
So I’ll make about a quart at a time, usually for an upcoming event. I got my first ice cream maker at a second hand store for not much, and it was a modern one with the freezable insert.
“frozen dairy dessert”
It’s “frozen dessert” because they can’t say ice cream when they take out dairy.
It’s actually because icecream has a defined air and fat content, and if you leave those guidelines you stop being icecream.
For now. I fully expect rules like this to be fully rolled back so that ice cubes will be legally “ice cream”.
Corn syrup has wrecked ice cream for me. I can’t stand it and actively avoid buying ice cream with it.
I miss the old Bryer’s
It still has a bit of gum in it (hard to find without these days) but that talenti stuff in the US appears to be real cream still - honestly that’s the big kicker for me with ice cream, too much gum or any vegetable product just makes it not worth the calories 🤢
All those bryer/haggen das big brand ones have so much air whipped into them it’s like eating frozen foam. Same with most chains’ milk shakes right now, they melt into nasty foam.
Drag wishes they sold more fake ice cream, but unfortunately the vast majority of what you can find at the supermarket isn’t vegan.
I’m more annoyed with the shrinkflation of increasing the aeration and how almost every brand shrunk their standard size from 1.75qt to 1.5qt (1656mL to 1420mL)
Umpqua was the last holdout in my area before they caved.
And the 1.75 qt was from a previous shrinkflation from the 2 qt size that used to be standard. I just quit buying ice cream because I’m tired of the BS.
Ice cream is always about churning air into cream. But nowadays the air ratio has definitely gone up. Seemingly across the board.
And that assumes that you’re not buying a brand that has gotten into the fakery.
guar gum, xantham gun, locust bean extract, etc - all emulsifers or texture additives used to mask lower product quality and allow more air to be whipped in.
Even the expensive stuff, Ben & Jerrys (sold out to PE a while ago), boutique brands at Whole Foods, and even Kirkland premiun have the same list of bullshit.
The only brand I can reliably find without them is Haagen Dazs.
Those aren’t typically used to mask anything, or to let you increase the air quantity. They’re typically used to keep the product stable during freezing, otherwise it can either turn into a brick because they froze too solidly, or because all the air escaped during cold storage.
In terms of cost savings, it does let them shorten the time needed to let the mix sit before churning, but that’s just because it helps the fat globs come back together easier.There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with using the gums. Xanthan is the only one really that isn’t available in an organic formulation, since they’re just bean powders mostly.
What’s the difference between using coconut oil or pectin like Hagan dazs does (a fat solid at higher temperatures that works as a stabilizer, and a fruit derived gelling agent) and using guar or locust bean gum? They’re all just plant powders and roughly equally processed.
It means you’re getting the lesser quality ones. The ones that don’t have as much cream in them and are filled with other stuff. There’s some higher quality brands to look out for, like Kawartha. Also, you can get something like the ninja creamii and make some ice cream at home. The difference in taste is actually quite noticeable compared to store bought.
I don’t eat cream all that often, and I try to buy the better brands, but I guess I actually need to figure out what ingredients I hate and read the labels. Ninja creami sounds neat, but I dont eat ice cream enough to warrant the counter space.
The question has been answered, but How Stuff Works has a good article which goes into detail.
As there may be regional differences, you might want to specify your area. For example, ice cream in the UK doesn’t have to meet the same requirements as in the USA, so oddities like cheap ice cream made with no dairy or cream is possible, using vegetable oil instead. Evan Edinger has a video on UK ice cream in particular: https://youtu.be/CfM7yZD0PlE
In the USA/Canada the cheapo ice cream is labeled “frozen dairy dessert”, instead of “ice cream”.
It’s “frozen dessert” if it can’t meet the dairy requirement.
I am from the US and I first noticed it a long time ago with certain novelty type ice cream products. Then eventually it seemed like some of the cheaper brands changed to add whatever softening thing to it. Now it seems like almost all brands have it, even regional brands known for their quality seem to be the same.
I almost remember it was advertised by the regional brand Friendly’s as “creamy”, and you could buy other flavors and avoid it… but now it’s all seems to be like that.
Also, they just don’t really seem to freezer burn nearly as bad, which is nice… if you liked the product in the first place.
You’re not alone
Thank you, I knew I had seen this question before
