Science Xplained Ice Cream Chemistry

today we're going to talk about food that needs no introduction we're talking about ice cream hi my name is Ana Ramirez welcome to science explained last year the United States consumed over billion and half gallons of ice cream that's equal to about 2,300 Olympic siiz pools or 112 million bath tubs amazing that's lot of ice cream from science point of view ice cream is pretty amazing too first all three states of matter coexist we have air bubbles gas liquid of milk and also we have ice crystals which are solid all living together in yummy combination now in order to make ice cream what you need to do is make concoction of milk and sugar and flavoring and mix them all together and cool them to very very low temperatures one way that you can do that is with liquid nitrogen liquid nitrogen is really cold it's- 320° or- 230° that's as cold as Neptune so let's see what happens that's neat all right so if mix this and continue to add liquid nitrogen and keep stirring it I'll eventually get ice cream now this ice cream is the best ice cream you're going to get because the ice crystals are super super small because we've cooled it with really really cold temperatures and it's going to make the ice cream really really creamy if you don't have liquid nitrogen available you can also make ice cream at home with things that you have in your refrigerator you can make combination of super cold liquid how do you do that well you add salt to ice now when you add salt this is called freezing point depression this happens all the time when cities put salt out on the snow what they're really doing is they're lowering the freezing point so that liquid will be present at those temperatures so what else can we learn about ice cream well when you melt ice cream and refreeze it it's not the same it changes permanently that's because the ice crystals grow to be bigger and bigger and change the texture now this may not seem very serious but scientists are interested in this because this tells us about other things like Avalanches Avalanches occur because snow pack has different Crystal sizes and eventually gets to point where it's unstable and causes snow to travel at 100 miles hour that's no joke so you see ice cream has lot of lessons in it not only does it tell us how to create tasty treats but it also teaches us how to prevent ourselves from serious threats I'm Ana Ramirez thank you for joining me at science explained and hope that you'll come back for another Edition