Ask Lemmy

Your fridge is not working like it should.

I have this problem every so often. If your freezer is anything like mine, you just keep grabbing ice cream during, or even right after, a defrost cycle. That, or there's something wrong with the defrost cycle itself. Best check your meters and gauges

It’s your freezer. I’ve also been buying Tillamook lately because it is softer and creamier: I can scoop it with an ice cream scoop. I certainly can’t drop a spoon in it, nor can I usually scoop it without destroying a normal spoon. I have to assume that you’re either using hyperbole or your freezer is not working correctly

Of course store-bought ice cream is soft. Have you noticed that they sell ice cream by volume and not by weight? They just add some more stabilizers, and basically "blow up" the mass with Nitrogen. Every liter of Nitrogen is a liter of ice cream more sold. Basically profit from the air. It is hard to get a cheaper ingredient except maybe water. And that is a bit harder to conceal.

Before anyone suggests it's my freezer, I've kept it relatively uncluttered and everything else stays frozen just fine. I also make sure not to purchase those tubs of "Frozen Dairy Dessert". What happened? Is this some cost cutting measure or are customer's preferences really going to extremely soft textures?

It's both. Commercial ice cream is either overchurned to add more air, making it lighter and softer, or uses a lot of additives. You have to buy "premium" brands to get real ice cream, or get it from a local ice cream place.

It also sounds like your freezer is not cold enough. I know because I'm dealing with a similar issue. My freezer is cold enough to keep everything frozen, except ice cream. My freezer was only getting down to 20°F which is cold enough for most things, but ice cream needs 0°F to stay frozen/hard. It's time to buy a new freezer.

Dunno, I don't eat ice cream much anymore, but this sounds preferable to the solid blocks that bend spoons and you need steel wedges and a splitting maul to get out of the carton.

Yes.

Many products are now whipped to increase the volume with less product as a form of shrinkflation and/or include ingredients to reduce ice crystal formation from repeated melting and refreezing to reduce waste and the impact of understaffing in supply chains and grocery stores that lead to product being left out for extended periods. Haagen Dazs recently finally converted all of their flavors. The plain vanilla and vanilla swiss almond were a few of the last ones to change. But it's been a slow progression of different manufacturers over the last couple of decades really.

It's sad because ice cream is my favorite dessert. I eat a lot of it, or at least used to. There are only a few brands with a few flavors remaining that make good "hard" ice cream outside of ice cream shops. But the good shops are so expensive.

By your ice cream based on weight. You can't get away from the additives that make it a little fluffier but you can get away from the overturned extra air filled batches. In the mid-eastern US Turkey Hill brand is pretty decently solid. I've also noticed some of the five ingredient only ice creams are solid. Then you have stuff like Häagen-Dazs.

Where are you finding this magic ice-cream. I fucking love soft fluffy ice-cream but everything i buy turns to stone in short order.

Might depend on the flavor as much as anything else. I buy the Tillamook Mountain Huckleberry from time to time and never noticed it being soft.

Ingredients are pretty much what I expect from any good ice cream:

https://www.tillamook.com/products/ice-cream/mountain-huckleberry

"Cream, Skim Milk, Milk, Sugar, Huckleberries, Water, Pasteurized Egg Yolks, Cornstarch, Guar Gum, Vanilla Extract, Citric Acid, Tara Gum, Natural Flavor, Fruit Juice (color)."

If you really want it harder, you can just turn your freezer’s temperature lower.

I had I think tillamook and hagan dazs stacked on top of eachother in my freezer. The hagan dazs was brick hard and the tillamook remained soft and easy to serve. I prefer soft but if you don’t like it give hagan dazs a try.

i could easily drop a spoon in the tub and watch it cut straight through to the bottom.

Dude, if this is true, your freezer is not cold enough.

Copious amounts of gums and max overruns (adding air) together result in softer texture when frozen, which the average consumer likes, and higher yields, which the producer likes.

Essentially you're buying 40% air with most brands, and the other 60% is not entirely cream & sugar & flavors. Try gelato or a local producer.

"Is my freezer the problem? No, it's every ice cream manufacturer that's wrong."

I've bought Target's store brand ice cream fairly recently and it was a perfectly normal consistency, for what it's worth. Maybe it's regional?

I have some Tillamook chocolate ice cream that was extremely hard when I scooped some earlier today. When we first get it from the store it is fairly soft though, so my assumption is that my freezer is set to be a lot colder than the one at the store.

Not sure what the exact temp is because it is a numbered dial, but I have a fuzzy recollection that it was about zero degrees F when I checked it a few years ago.

Ice cream can't take a joke these days. Just starts melting down and turning into a puddle at the slightest provocation. Soft.

There are 2 types of ice cream:

Real ice cream, made with nothing more than milk, cream, sugar, and flavoring (vanilla, chocolate, whatever)

And bullshit ice cream that starts with a custard (aka Philly Style).

Real ice cream freezes hard, Philly style always stays softer.

Then there's "overrun" which is a measure of how much air is trapped in the ice cream. Cheaper brands have higher overrun rates, and it makes ice cream softer.

If it's soft but cold, that means it's not dense. If it's not dense, that means there's likely a lot of air. Probably almost half.

a 3 gallon pail of their stuff is 15 pounds. Let's turn that into useful measurements.

3 gallons = 11.356 litres
15 pounds = 6.8 kg.

1 ml of water is 1 gram, so if the bucket was full of just water, it would weight nearly double what this bucket weights.

From my time working with the product, I know that Soft-serve is commonly 40% air.
6.8kg is 58.8% of the weight of the ice cream. That's pretty darn close to 60%

Edit: Changed g to gallons to make things less confusing.

I suppose people complained? Or it's the substitution of fat for some god awful synth version.

I find Haagan Dazs stays pretty solid. Ben and Jerry's too. But even then, it's only just.

Carte d'Or and all its kin I find the same as you, so soft as to be no longer 'ice' cream, but rather some sort of sickly sweet whipped soup.

Varies a lot by brand. Some brands started whipping more air into the chemical slurry they call ice cream in order it to rip us off. You can tell by the weight. Try the heavier pints.

I usually have to set mine out for a while to not bend my spoon, and we usually just get whatever's on sale or store brand. 🤷🏻‍♂️

There was a minor scandal a few years ago where brands like Bryers were injecting air into their ice cream so they could do shinkflation without changing the size of the packaging. But I haven't noticed anything like that with Tillamook, which we almost always have in the house.