Today's experiment is sponsored by HelloFresh.
Hey guys, I'm Nate. Welcome back to the workshop.
A lot of people have commented asking us to make
some ice cream using liquid nitrogen, so today
that's what we're going to do in a few different varieties.
In the past Grant has shown you how to make some
futuristic ice cream beads by melting existing ice cream,
putting it into a little squeeze container, and then
dripping that out into liquid nitrogen. Today we'll show
you a recipe you can use instead of melting existing
ice cream, and we'll make both the futuristic bead-style
ice cream and regular ice cream.
Here we have a lot of equipment and ingredients
to make our ice cream, and I'll go over each aspect
as we get to it.
Let's start by making our Dippin' Dots-styled ice cream.
This recipe is very basic.
We'll start with ½ cup of milk and ½ cup of half & half.
My one-cup measuring cup is conveniently divided in half
inside at the ½-cup mark so I can just fill to one line with
the half & half and then finish filling it with the milk.
Now let's see if I have a steady enough hand to pour
the milk and the half-and-half into the bottle from our
measuring cup.
Hmm. Not so much.
You know I'm actually going to blame the measuring cup
for this one. It doesn't pour very well.
This is also a very clean new plate, so I'm just going to
pour it straight from the plate into the bottle.
Why does a folded plate work better than the pouring
spout on the measuring cup? Hmm.
With our milk and half & half combined in our squeeze
bottle, it's time to add ¼ cup of sugar and a dash of
vanilla extract.
This is going to pour just about as well as the milk.
About the same.
All right. Close our top and we're just going to stir this
around. We want the sugar to completely dissolve
into the liquid.
It can take a while for all the sugar to dissolve because
our milk and half & half are quite cold and sugar doesn't
dissolve as quickly in cold liquid.
Looking at the bottom, it's hard to see but you can
kind of make out grains on the bottom of sugar if there's
too much of it. I'm just trying to stir it up until there are
no more. All right.
I think most of my sugar is dissolved. Let's see how
this is tasting before I freeze it. I'm just going to drip a
little bit out on my finger here.
Tastes really good. It's got a good vanilla flavor, it's nice
and sweet, nice and creamy.
Now what we need to do is freeze this into our
ice cream beads.
I have here a stack of styrofoam plates, which should
insulate pretty well. I'm going to fill one of these plates
with liquid nitrogen so I have a nice shallow surface to
drip our ice cream mixture onto so we don't end up
piling all of our ice cream beads in one spot.
Let's see if I'm able to pour straight onto this plate.
Our plate changes shape a little bit as it gets cold. That's exciting.
There we go. It's a nice layer of liquid nitrogen there.
Plates have settled back down to the shape they were
originally. Now olet's see what happens if we just drip in,
a little bit at a time, our ice cream mixture,
Some of our ice cream beads have frozen just slightly to
the plate beneath it. But just a little bit of pressure
and they sort of pop right off.
There we go: Milk, half & half, sugar, and vanilla,
dripped into some liquid nitrogen and we have our
futuristic ice cream bead dessert. These things are
really good. A word of caution, though: When they first
come out of the liquid nitrogen they are unbelievably
cold, and if you eat them right away they will stick to the
inside of your mouth and burn it with the cold.
If it's cold enough to stick to water on your finger, it will
stick to your tongue and hurt. DON'T DO IT.
Once it's warmed up enough that it's not going to stick
to the inside of your mouth, enjoy a delicious and very
interesting textured dessert.
It's really good.
It is a lot more effort than just scooping ice cream
out of the carton, but it's a lot cooler,
and I mean that in both ways.
Our dessert today is brought to us by liquid nitrogen, but
the rest of our meal is going to be delivered to us by
HelloFresh. Let's take just a moment to look at how their
service works. If you like to cook at home, HelloFresh is
a great way to do it. They've really set up a system that's
convenient to use.
If you have a busy schedule you can choose the delivery
day that works best for you. If you're going to be out of
town you can pause your account for weeks at a time.
All of the ingredients come pre-measured in handy
labeled meal kits so you know which ingredients go with
which recipe, unlike at a grocery store.
And of course the whole kit is delivered right to your
door in recyclable insulated packaging. HelloFresh
offers a wide variety of chef-created recipes that are
different every week. They have the Classic, Veggie, and
Family plans to choose from.
The recipes are designed to only take about 30 minutes
to prep so you're not going to have to spend all night in
the kitchen cooking.
Several of the meals are designed to be one-pot recipes
for speedy cooking and minimal cleanup. Each week,
one meal in the classic menu is designed to only take
20 minutes to prep. This was my first time trying one of
these services that delivers meals with all the recipes
and ingredients included.
I thought the instructions were easy to follow,
prep time was quick, and the
quality of the food was excellent.
It's a really convenient and easy service to use,
knowing that you're getting full meals in just the right
portion sizes.
For $30 off your first week of HelloFresh, visit
HelloFresh.com and enter promo code
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Dinner was great. Now let's focus back on the desserts.
Using our milk, our half & half, a little bit of sugar, and a
dash of vanilla, we were able to make a delicious vanilla-
flavored ice cream beads dessert.
But I want to try adding a few different flavors to see if
we can mix it up a little.
Rather than using regular milk, I'm going to try making
an eggnog and a chocolate version of our Dippin' Dots-
style ice cream. Let's try the eggnog first.
One cup eggnog. I'll try pouring this while it's just half
full to see if it'll pour better that way.
Yep.
Half the cup of eggnog, ½ cup of half & half, and ¼ cup
of sugar.
Should just pour the sugar directly onto the plate
and then use the plate to pour it into the bottle.
I think I will do that next time.
I'm not adding any vanilla extract this time because I
think the eggnog will provide all the flavor we need.
You do have to mix it up and get that sugar
dissolving, though.
Now I think a great flavor to go with our eggnog is going
to be hot chocolate flavor. Of course, it's going to be
cooled down a lot so it's not going to have the heat of
hot cocoa, but it will have the flavor of hot cocoa.
To do that I have some chocolate milk and I've taken our
half & half and I've mixed in a bunch of cocoa powder.
Cocoa powder does not usually dissolve well in cold
liquids so I did heat up the half &half, then I mixed in the
cocoa powder, and then I cooled it down in the
refrigerator until it was about room temperature.
Now we'll follow our same recipe, but instead of using
milk and half & half we'll use chocolate milk and
chocolate half & half. Should be pretty good.
I don't know how well this cup pours but
not too bad.
There we go. Chocolate milk and half & half turned into
hot chocolate. This should be delicious.
Now as delicious as that is, ice cream is supposed to be
a very sweet dessert so I'm still going to add a little bit
of sugar to this. Not ¼ cup like I have for the others
but a little bit, maybe ⅛ cup.
There we go. We now have our eggnog- and our hot
chocolate-flavored ice cream mixes, so let's pour a
couple of plates of liquid nitrogen and start dripping.
Eggnog and hot chocolate ice cream beads.
That's a really good combo.
There you go. A couple of recipes on how to make
eggnog- and hot chocolate-flavored futuristic ice cream
beads. These things are really good.
It's a good flavor combination, too, eggnog and
hot chocolate. I noticed when dripping our ice cream
formula into the liquid nitrogen it would take a second
or two for the individual beads to begin to freeze,
and if one drip touched another drip before it had a
chance to freeze, they would join together and then you
just get a larger ice-cream bead instead of
two small ones.
Whether or not that's a good thing might be up to you.
I generally tried to get the small beads but if I was
getting a couple that were made of two or even three
drops I didn't really worry about it. All right.
Now we know how to make our futuristic Dippin' Dots-
style ice cream. Let's move on to making some regular
styled ice cream.
For our more stereotypically textured ice cream we're
going to try a slightly different recipe of ½ cup half & half
and ½ cup heavy cream. We'll still also add
¼ cup of sugar and a dash of vanilla.
Now let's stir this up until all of the sugar is dissolved.
We can't really see the sugar very well the same way we
could in the squeeze bottle. Since we won't be able to
see the sugar very well, we'll need to rely on the sound
and feel of the spatula to know when our sugar is
dissolved. There we go.
I think our sugar is now completely dissolved into our
mixture, so it's time to start adding the cold.
Let's pour our liquid nitrogen into our measuring cup
and then carefully pour from there into our mixture, and
then start stirring it around.
I'm only adding about ¼ cup of the liquid nitrogen
at a time.
You can see that the nitrogen gets inside of the cream
mixture and makes it bubble up quite a bit.
It's stopped hissing.
I think that means all of the nitrogen is gone and it's
time to add more.
We're looking really good now; that's definitely starting
to look like ice cream. As I'm stirring I'm trying to keep
the liquid nitrogen and the ice cream off the walls of
the bowl as much as I can because if the liquid nitrogen
stays in contact within the metal it will create really cold
points, and then we'll have super-frozen bits of ice cream
on the sides, but not as much in the middle.
Beautiful. That is looking like ice cream. Mm.
It's a little bit soft. If you like your ice cream harder, I'd
say you can just keep adding a little bit more liquid
nitrogen to cool it down even further. I kind of like
slightly soft ice cream, personally. Let's have a war in the
comment section about which is better: Hard ice cream
or soft ice cream. But a polite war.
A nice, gentle, kindly-spoken war.
That right there, I think, is ice cream ready to serve.
Let's try some of this.
That's really good. That is very good.
Unbelievably creamy.
75% of this recipe is cream so it makes sense it would
be really creamy.
Scoop out our ice cream
and I think we are ready to serve.
Our recipe for vanilla ice cream works great, so let's
see if we can add a few more things and give ourselves
a little bit different flavor. This time I'm going to try for
caramel, and then I'm going to see if I can make some
raspberry ice cream with real raspberries.
Just add a little bit of this [caramel extract]. I'm not sure
how powerful it is. I also have some caramel sauce
that's meant for ice cream, and once I've got the ice
cream a little bit frozen I'll swirl in some caramel sauce
Sand then freeze it even more.
Just stirring to dissolve all the sugar.
There we go. Our ice cream is now at a pretty good
consistency. I'm going to add some caramel and then
just try and freeze it up a little bit more with our caramel
gently swirled in.
Beautiful. Got streaks of caramel. It's not so mixed in
that you don't see it anymore, and then of course it's
caramel-flavored to begin with.
It's really good stuff. Super creamy.
This has turned out great. Let's try raspberry.
Not really sure exactly how much of that to add.
This is going to be raspberry-flavored ice cream, so let's
add a drop of red to turn our ice cream pink. Perfect.
We've got some nice raspberries that we were going to
add into our ice cream but unfortunately they thawed a
little bit more than they were supposed to so they're
very mushy. I'm afraid if I try and mix them in like this
we'll just have a pureé and we kind of want the chunks of
raspberry instead. So to fix that I'm just going to take a
little bit of liquid nitrogen, pour that over the raspberries
and hope that solidifies them so they'll mix into the ice
cream a little bit nicer.
Scrape our raspberries and our liquid nitrogen just down
into the bowl.
That is looking like some delicious raspberry ice cream.
Very good.
Lots of good creamy flavor of course, some good
raspberry flavor, and a little bit of a
tart kick from the actual raspberry mixed in. This
is delicious.
There you have it: Milk, cream, half & half, some liquid
nitrogen, and several delicious recipes for ice cream.
These are all seriously very good.
We have our standard vanilla, we've got our raspberry
with actual raspberries in it, and we have our caramel
flavor with caramel swirls in it, which is also fantastic.
Our standard-style ice cream was made by mixing up
our cream and our half & half and then adding liquid
nitrogen to that while we stirred it. Our Dippin' Dot-style
ice cream was made by slowly squeezing out a mixture
of milk and half & half with some sugar and flavoring
added into the liquid nitrogen so it
formed nice little ice cream beads. With our standard
ice cream recipe if you do want it to be a little lower-fat
you can substitute milk for the half & half
and substitute half & half for the cream.
This will cut down on the fat a lot and if you're using
liquid nitrogen it's still going to freeze and get pretty
solid. It won't taste quite as creamy but it will still be
quite delicious.
Thanks for joining us for this video today and remember
to come gear yourself up with hats, shirts, and other
cool merchandise at thekingofrandom.com
See you there.
Yes, this workbench is clean enough to eat off of.
Why do you ask?
I don't know about you, but I'm going to feel really fat by
the end of it. I don't look it, but I'm going to feel it.
Very cool.
I've used that pun like twelveS times today already.
There we go: Our ice cream made with liquid nitrogen
and our dinner provided by HelloFresh. To try out their
service head to HelloFresh.com and enter promo code
"KINGOFRANDOM30" for $30 off of your first week of food.