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.)
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.
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.
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 == Trans Saturated 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.
Alton Brown’s Good Eats explains fats
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.
The Mayo Clinic has a good overview here that explains about the different types of fats
I mean if they gut the regulatory agencies the companies will probably just remove the ingredient list altogether
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
