Have you tried making liquid nitrogen ice cream? Don't do it like this

by Shayna Glick, Posted Apr 12th 2008 @ 12:01PM

A bowl containing three flavors of ice cream.

I had heard of making ice cream with liquid nitrogen. I saw it on Iron Chef America not too long ago, if I remember correctly. I haven't ever tried it though. Where do you find the liquid nitrogen?

Anyway, here's a video of a couple of guys trying to make the frozen dessert in a blender. The result is hilarious. I strongly recommend that you do not try this at home. Even if it didn't look slightly dangerous, you seriously don't want to clean up that mess.

Source

Filed Under: Science, On the Blogs, Food Quest
Tags: blender, Food Quest, ice cream, IceCream, liquid nitrogen, LiquidNitrogen

Chew on This

Royal Wedding Cake Details Revealed! - YumSugar

Make Your Own Pop Tarts - CHOW
Denny's Introduces a Maple Bacon Sundae - Eater
Whole Foods Opening Bars in Stores - USA Today
Rules Of Bar Etiquette -- For The Bartender - HuffPost Food

Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

4-12-2008 @1:13PM mu said... You can probably get liquid nitrogen at a welding supply shop. At least that's where I remember getting it for my high school superconductor project. You'll need a vented thermos of some sort, a non-vented thermos will explode (or at least crack and leak all over) from the pressure as the liquid nitrogen evaporates.
Reply

Vote upVote downReport

4-12-2008 @3:24PM Max said... Liquid nitrogen is available at places that sell air to old people, or hospitals (you know, in the pressuresed bottle with the little tube going into your nose) you need a Hazmat training certificate to legally transport it, but one of those is pretty easy to get your hands on to anyone whos worked in a factory, the place my high school got theirs when they made ice cream was VitalAir. The reason the blender exploded was the ice cream was warming the nitrogen turning it into a gas, building pressure like steam
Reply

Vote upVote downReport

4-12-2008 @4:56PM Doctor Electro said... You must still be quite young to make statements about "old people" and oxygen supply houses. I'm not old yet but I'm on oxygen because chronic pleurisy keeps filling my chest cavity with fluid. I occasionally need surgery to relieve the pressure but I have to be on oxygen all the time.

That said, I think the video was played for comedy and those apparetn idiots knew exactly what would happen. I agree that you should not try this at home, even if you do know where Major Medical is in your town.
Reply

Vote upVote downReport

4-12-2008 @5:31PM pink_lemonade143 said... On Iron Chef, they poured the liquid nitrogen into a stand mixer, not a blender.
Reply

Vote upVote downReport

4-12-2008 @7:10PM Rob Landley said... That's me in the back of the video and my friend Mark running the blender. We've made liquid nitrogen ice cream hundreds of times, in a steel bowl with a wooden spoon. Mark ordered a BlendTec blender (the same type as in the "will it blend" series of youtube videos) and started making his own "will it blend" videos. He tried pure LN2 first (check the videos mark uploaded), and that worked fine. Then we tried doing _ice_cream_ in the blender.

That didn't work so well.

What that video does _not_ show is the following 30 minutes of frantically cleaning his apartment with sponges and paper towels and those handi-wipe things before the milk-based product could soak in and really start to smell, short out his router (totally covered), and so on. Some even made it into the bedroom...
Reply

Vote upVote downReport

4-30-2008 @5:04PM MomToEli said... We are wanting to make this at our Spring Campout with our Cub Scouts. Well, FOR our Cub Scouts, not WITH them! Anyway, we will have approximately 100 people there. I gather we need to make this recipe times 5? Would it be best to mix this up in single recipe batches? Can we mix this in, say, 5 gallon water coolers without a problem? And what sort of attachment would I need to get for our drill to mix this?

Sorry for all the questions. I'm putting it together, but the men get to do the mixing :)
Reply