Hardening your ice cream after extruding it from the ice cream machine
This process consists of storing your ice cream in a blast freezer in order to lower its temperature even further (to -18/-20°C) without stirring it.
Not all water in your ice cream is frozen af ter the final churning process in your ice cream machine (at a temperature of -7/-8°C only 50% of the water has turned into ice), so you need to bring the temperature of your ice cream down to -14°C for storage in a display counter or even down to -18°C if you want to store it in a freezer.
That gives you two ways of doing this:
- Place your ice cream mixture in a blast freezer for a few minutes before storing it in a display counter.
- Place your ice cream mixture in a blast freezer until it reaches a core temperature of -18°C before storing it in a freezer at -18°C.
A good hardening of your ice cream, brought about in the shor test time possible, has many benefits:
- It permanently sets your ice cream’s structure
- Your ice cream maintains its consistency
- Your ice cream maintains its ‘overrun’
Generally, hardening is only applied when the situation requires a considerable amount of ice cream to be preserved for a certain amount of time, maintaining its structure, texture and flavour characteristics with it.