Why rock salt for ice cream

The trickiest is freezing the cream. Freeze it too quickly, then your ice cream crystallizes and becomes crunchy. Though it may seem counter intuitive, rock salt—which melts ice on roadways and sidewalks—is an indispensable part of freezing ice cream because it sets up the rich texture for the dessert. While frozen desserts have been around for hundreds of years, what we know today as ice cream wasn't available to the public until factory production of it started in the mids.

According to Zinger's Ice Cream, the hand-cranked ice cream maker was invented in , and in Jacob Fussell opened the first ice cream factory in Baltimore, Maryland. After combining the ingredients for the cream mixture, you would set up an ice bath and add rock salt to it. Then the container with the cream mixture goes into the ice bath, which will begin the freezing process.

You are not adding rock salt to the cream mixture itself. When making home made ice cream you need to add salt to an outer bowl of ice water that freezes your ice cream as you churn it.

But have you ever wondered what does the salt do to the ice when making ice cream? Why do you need salt in the first place and is it even necessary? The answer is yes and here's why:. Adding salt to ice when making ice cream quickly lowers the temperature of the ice which is needed to make the ice cream solid. Without salt the outer ice doesn't get cold enough to freeze the ice cream and it will stay liquid.

The quicker ice cream freezes as it is mixed the smaller the ice crystals inside the ice cream are, giving it that fluffy texture. The salt in the ice means the ice cream can freeze a lot faster leading to fluffier more delicious ice cream. Salt doesn't go in the ice cream itself, but rather goes in the ice on the outside of the ice cream bucket. Generally if you're making homemade ice cream you have 2 buckets. An inner bucket with the ice cream and a churning or whisking device and an outer bucket with ice and salt.

If you were to just use salt alone in the outer bucket the ice itself wouldn't be cold enough to freeze the ice cream, or it would take significantly longer. But because of the presence of salt this mixture will re-freeze at lower temperatures than 0C. In both cases the lowering of the freezing point will depend on the concentration of salt in the mixture. Enter your keywords. Sign-Up Here. Yet, paradoxically, salt famously helps prevent ice from freezing to the road.

How is this melt-assisting substance valuable to the ice cream creation process?