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.)
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.
Another NoStupidQuestion, what are trans and saturated fats anyway?
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.
Alton Brown’s Good Eats explains fats
TIL - Thank you!
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
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.
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…
“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”.
Drag wishes they sold more fake ice cream, but unfortunately the vast majority of what you can find at the supermarket isn’t vegan.
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.
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 - overrun.
You see this mostly in cheaper brands.
Yep. Cause they sell per volume, not weight
Its 50% air now. Costs the same price but half the cost u manufacture cos it half air. Good ol shrinkflation.
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.
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.
there is a segment on German public TV if that’s any help https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zdfzeit/zdfzeit-tricks-der-lebensmittelindustrie-mit-sebastian-lege-104.html#xtor=CS5-95
(Starts at 13:15 min). from what i remember it shows the same pattern mentioned by other commenters. vegetable fats instead of milk, thickeners, stabilizers, artificial flavors.
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.
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.
I will never get over Breyer’s ice cream going cheap.
Have you looked at Häagen-Dazs? I only looked at their plain chocolate flavor, but the ingredients are only Cream, Skim Milk, Cane Sugar, Cocoa Processed With Alkali, and Egg Yolks. That’s the real deal right there!
I like Ben and Jerry’s, but I definitely know that it’s not “real” ice cream. They shine because they have good flavor combinations.
Bruster’s and Graeter’s are ice cream shops that make their ice cream in-house. They also contain stabilizers but I prefer it over what’s in the grocery store. I’m not sure if that is because I’m used to it or what. If you have a location for either of these near you, I would check them out.
Lastly, I would check if you have any local places that make their own ice cream. You might find what you’re looking for there.
The ironic thing is Breyers ran commercials about how you could pronounce every ingredient in their ice cream. They had like a 10 year old read their ingredient list vs. competitors.
But when they got bought out by Unilever, quality went downhill fast
Honestly I took a pretty long hiatus from sweets/ice cream.
But now that I have a kid who wants to try things, I am buying it occasionally again. I have been disturbed by most of what I have tried recently. Only have had good luck with small overpriced premium labeled products.
Will definitely look at Haagen as it seems to be everywhere.
Bluebell Dutch chocolate is the best thing Texas ever shared with the world
Chapmans is my go to grocery store ice cream now that breyers has been garbage for more than a few years. It’s not sending, but it’s at least icecream
Big ice cream figured out churning is a pain in the ass. So now they just whip it and freeze it in bulk. It’s not the same product at all.
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.
Changed with ice cream in general? No. But there are things that have been possible to add to ice cream for a while that do what you describe. It could be that you’re just starting to notice, you shifted brands, or the brand you liked shifted formulations.
Many people dislike the things that get added to ice cream, and so there are definitely brands out there that don’t include those things.
In my opinion the worst of the additives is not nearly as bad as a lot of people would make them out to be.In the broadest sense possible ice cream is sugar, fat, water and thickener where the fat has been cooled to a solid and allowed to just start to re-form into a lump, the ice hasn’t been allowed to form crystals big enough to notice, and the thickener and sugars glue the fat and ice together such that they trap miniature air bubbles.
Some people insist that the fat and thickener have to come from cow milk in the form of milk fat and milk proteins, but that’s a bit pedantic for my tastes.The easiest way to cheap out on ice cream is to add a lot more air. Since we sell it based on volume, if we churn more air into it we get more ice cream to sell for the same quantity of ingredients, and the only effect is that the ice cream is lighter, softer and fluffier.
There’s a legal maximum to how much air you can mix in though.The next hurdle you run into is that milk proteins are actually kinda shit at keeping those air bubbles trapped. Adding things like guar gum or carrageenan will make it much gloopier and hold those air bubbles better.
This makes the ice cream last longer in a warehouse without the bubbles getting out and leaving your ice cream as a brick.Next is rampant ice crystal spread, which can turn the ice cream into a brick in the warehouse. This can be slowed down using something called methylcellulose. It’s basically processed plant fiber ground into a powder. It’s also used in pills as the inert binder, and as a dietary fiber source.
It’s popular because is known to be safe and inert, it’s very cheap, it prevents ice crystal formation, and it has the fun quirk of getting thicker as it warms, for the added property of keeping your ice cream fluffy and areated as it warms up on your drive home.Finally, you can tweak the fat blend. This one isn’t as common because milk fat is already insanely cheap since we subsidize the hell out of the dairy industry.
Changing the blend to use fats that are solid at higher temperatures does have utility for things you expect to be eaten slower, at higher temperatures, or if you want parents to not be mad that your ice cream makes kids extra sticky.By far the biggest way that I’ve cream will save costs is by putting as much air in it as possible. It lets them sell you less in the same size box for the same price.
It’s a case where shrinkflation means making things bigger, which is fun.The brands that didn’t take that route invariably rebranded as “premium” ice creams, so they can charge more for the same thing without raising consumer ire.
You really hate dairy huh?
What? No, I just like making ice cream and I research my hobbies. Why would you think I hate dairy?
Closest I get is thinking that it’s silly to insist that something like oat milk ice cream isn’t ice cream.
Yes on both accounts. It is frozen whipped topping. It had enough air to hold its shape when it melts.
This reminds me of this ice cream I used to buy as a kid called the Snow Storm. I’ve eaten it over the years and one day the packaging slightly changed with a new emblem that stated now made with real ice cream. That’s when I started questioning all ice creams. Nowadays I’m more aware of ice cream as opposed to a frozen dessert or treat which a lot of “ice creams” now have on their packaging here at least in the US.
