Mountain House Freeze Dried Neapolitan Ice Cream
Alert! Weirdest ice cream blog post you have ever read ahead!
If any of you thought that I could actually survive five days without ice cream while backpacking, ha! Wrong. That's why there is freeze dried ice cream, also know as astronaut ice cream. Two of my friends I was backpacking with and I bought ourselves some freeze dried ice cream to bring along on our trip for a treat one night.
Each packet of freeze dried ice cream is a single serving. We had a couple of different flavors, and I opted for the neapolitan flavor, a childhood favorite of mine, over mint chocolate chip.
Before this instance I had never eaten freeze dried ice cream, which other members of our backpacking group thought was strange. Apparently, astronaut ice cream sandwiches had a moment back when we were kids and I totally missed out on the trend. I guess I was too busy eating real ice cream or something.
Thus, opening the package, I had no idea what to expect. I was greeted with a little square of chalky weirdness. The big square of the ice cream was cut up into smaller bite-size squares. I was a little disappointed that the way the ice cream was cut separated the chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry sections from one another. I used to love neapolitan ice cream because you could eat three ice cream flavors at the same time and didn't have to make any decisions.
What surprised me most about this product was that it tasted exactly like ice cream. I kind of expected it to taste like some sort of strange, chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry candy. The only difference, was quite obviously, the texture. The texture was chalky, but not hard, and light and airy. As you bit it, it was brittle and broke apart. It was also smooth as you ate it, despite being chalky at the start. Annoyingly, it stuck in your teeth as you chewed. All in all, it was better than I expected it to be and tasted more like than ice cream than I expected it to taste.
The reason it tastes so much like ice cream? It, in reality, is freeze dried ice cream. For some reason, I expected this to be a creation of food science that resembled freeze dried ice cream. I did not expect Mountain House to straight up freeze dry ice cream. It is difficult for me to imagine that freeze drying ice cream is cheaper or easier than making some food science concoction. But what do I know?
In case you are wondering what the process of freeze drying is, I will tell you. To freeze dry ice cream, first you place it in a a chamber, attached to a tube, called a cold trap, and at the other end of of the tube you have a vacuum pump. You get the temperature of the cold trap to about -70 degrees C. The vacuum pump then lowers the pressure so the water in the ice cream sublimates out of the ice cream and into the cold trap. So why exactly do you need the water to sublimate, and not go through a liquid phase to get it out of the ice cream? If you let the water go through the liquid phase, aka melting, the air evaporates out of the ice cream, and the ice cream loses its structure. So when you freeze dry it the air stays in the ice cream, making it more like the ice cream we know. If you want to know a lot more about it, watch this awesome video.
If any of you thought that I could actually survive five days without ice cream while backpacking, ha! Wrong. That's why there is freeze dried ice cream, also know as astronaut ice cream. Two of my friends I was backpacking with and I bought ourselves some freeze dried ice cream to bring along on our trip for a treat one night.
Each packet of freeze dried ice cream is a single serving. We had a couple of different flavors, and I opted for the neapolitan flavor, a childhood favorite of mine, over mint chocolate chip.
Before this instance I had never eaten freeze dried ice cream, which other members of our backpacking group thought was strange. Apparently, astronaut ice cream sandwiches had a moment back when we were kids and I totally missed out on the trend. I guess I was too busy eating real ice cream or something.
Thus, opening the package, I had no idea what to expect. I was greeted with a little square of chalky weirdness. The big square of the ice cream was cut up into smaller bite-size squares. I was a little disappointed that the way the ice cream was cut separated the chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry sections from one another. I used to love neapolitan ice cream because you could eat three ice cream flavors at the same time and didn't have to make any decisions.
What surprised me most about this product was that it tasted exactly like ice cream. I kind of expected it to taste like some sort of strange, chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry candy. The only difference, was quite obviously, the texture. The texture was chalky, but not hard, and light and airy. As you bit it, it was brittle and broke apart. It was also smooth as you ate it, despite being chalky at the start. Annoyingly, it stuck in your teeth as you chewed. All in all, it was better than I expected it to be and tasted more like than ice cream than I expected it to taste.
The reason it tastes so much like ice cream? It, in reality, is freeze dried ice cream. For some reason, I expected this to be a creation of food science that resembled freeze dried ice cream. I did not expect Mountain House to straight up freeze dry ice cream. It is difficult for me to imagine that freeze drying ice cream is cheaper or easier than making some food science concoction. But what do I know?
In case you are wondering what the process of freeze drying is, I will tell you. To freeze dry ice cream, first you place it in a a chamber, attached to a tube, called a cold trap, and at the other end of of the tube you have a vacuum pump. You get the temperature of the cold trap to about -70 degrees C. The vacuum pump then lowers the pressure so the water in the ice cream sublimates out of the ice cream and into the cold trap. So why exactly do you need the water to sublimate, and not go through a liquid phase to get it out of the ice cream? If you let the water go through the liquid phase, aka melting, the air evaporates out of the ice cream, and the ice cream loses its structure. So when you freeze dry it the air stays in the ice cream, making it more like the ice cream we know. If you want to know a lot more about it, watch this awesome video.
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