An integral part of summer is the ice cream But the problem is that it melts quickly when the temperature rises. Can scientists do something to keep it cool?

And who doesn’t get rid of his ice cream melting and rolling slowly in his hands. However, the Japanese company’s ice cream – also known as “ice cream that does not melt” and later the Soft Serve ice cream, which both withstand numerous thermal attacks without melting, were viral a few years ago. The scientists behind this ice cream had been filled with polyphenols, a category antioxidant found in many fruits. The result was the ice cream to have a strange stability, A remarkable lack of creamy liquid running on the fingers. But how did it work?

The ice cream consists mainly of cream and sugar. The machines for its production lift the sweet mixture into a cold barrel and, when it forms a frozen film inside the barrel, a shackler crushes it. This prevents ice crystals from getting an unpleasant size. When the ice cream, somewhere on the route between the factory and your freezing, it is slightly warmed, melts and then refrigerates resulting in bulky, unpleasant crystals.

This is a well -known problem with the transfer of ice cream from its first freezing to a world full of temperatures higher than zero. Ice cream manufacturers are already using a series of stabilizers to try to prevent ice cream from suffering too much from his journey.

When Cameron Wicks, a food scientist studying at the University of Wisconsin and now working at the food production company General Mills, saw the video with the Kanazawa Ice ice cream, wondered how polyphenols had their stabilizing action. The molecules are known for their possible health -promoting characteristics, not necessarily for their mechanical properties. In the laboratory, he began experimenting with mixtures of cream using higher levels of a particular polyphenol: Tannic acid.

In experiments he did and mixed cream with a tannic acid of 0.75%, 1.5%and 3%, he noticed that almost immediately, the highest concentrations began to thicken. After letting the mixtures cool for 24 hours, he took measurements and noted that the tannic acid helped to coagulate so much that the 3% mixture could be cut with a knife or turn over without falling from a cup.

Putting the cream under the microscope, Wicks saw that the highest concentrations had more distinct fat pellets. Tannic acid, as she and her colleagues assumed, interacted with the cream proteins, creating a support network or barrier in the merger of pellets. This would explain why the ice cream made from such a substance is melting resistant: the fats released by the melted cream crystals could not be dissolved, thanks to the addition of polyphenol.

So perhaps polyphenols may join the ranks of the most established stabilizers at some point, helping the ice cream keep them in good condition for some time, thus increasing the enjoyment for young and old alike.