Making Ice Cream with Dry Ice Instead of Liquid Nitrogen

by | Sep 26, 2017 | Homemade Ice Cream

You’ve probably read about or visited a Liquid Nitrogen ice cream shop or the process of freezing ice cream using LN2 or Liquid Nitrogen with a temperature capability of -320°F, but what about those who want to make ice cream at home and not interested in  purchasing LN2, then Dry Ice is your answer. Dry Ice, a solid form of carbon dioxide and a slightly warmer than LN2 at -109.3°F, but still pretty cold. Adding powdered dry ice into the cream liquid will solidify in a minute or so making homemade ice cream.

Clearly a few questions must be churning through your head, such as “is dry ice safe to consume” or will dry ice effect the the flavor profile of the product?” Good questions. I personally have not had the pleasure to eating ice cream frozen in this fashion, but in reading several articles and reports, doesn’t seem to be a concern. After the initial thought of the concept sinks in, here is a process and recipe from a thermo blogger on thermoworks.com. Keep in mind dry ice is COLD stuff and cannot be handled with bare hands, this will burn the skin for sure.

SIMPLE VANILLA ICE CREAM

Ingredients

    • 2 lbs 3.3 oz (1 kg) Whole milk
    • 8 oz (225 g) Granulated sugar
    • 3.5 oz (100 g) Heavy cream
    • 3.4 oz (95 g) Nonfat dry milk powder
    • 1/2 oz (12 g) Vanilla extract
    • 1/8 oz (3.5 g) Salt – I’d suggest this is optional and not required.

PREPARING & ADDING DRY ICE POWDER

Be sure you are wearing thermo gloves to protect from burning your skin, wearing protective glasses is a bad idea either.

Have available about 2 lbs of dry ice that can usually be purchased in a block or peanut size pellets. If the latter is available, then opt for that. Take the 10 – 30 pellets, toss into a standard blender and pulse spin until the pellets are ground into snow. Spoon out the snow and add to the already prepared mixing bowl of liquid ice cream ingredients. Make sure the blender is churning at a low speed while adding as needed spoonfuls of dry ice snow, till thickened and serve.

You can find a number of articles and “how to” recipes on videos or websites like molecularrecipes.com. Making ice cream using this option will impress your dessert friends, is fun at parties and definitely more cost effective and easier to find than liquid nitrogen.

Contact Darryl, he can help you with a number of concepts and creative ways to freeze ice cream and non-dairy frozen treats at home or commercially.

Darryl David
Latest posts by Darryl David (see all)