Not a single person I know hates ice cream. We love that it's flavorful, cold, sweet, and creamy. Traditionally, ice creams are supposed to be made with milk, eggs, cream, sugar, and a flavor. Unfortunately, that is not what we ingest, AT ALL! Ice creams made with more or less the same ingredients used in the kitchen- like eggs and milk- are healthier, but that doesn't translate to a lucrative business model. These kitchen ingredients are very expensive and hence, it won't cater to the company and its shareholders. One more problem with these ingredients is that they melt away easily. Even at the melting point, i.e. 0°, ice creams melt because of the enormous fat content and dissolved sugar, which makes the moving around of ice cream very difficult. Brands that make ice creams the traditional way are not ubiquitous, and we don't see their outlets like we see Mother Diary, Amul etc. NIC has managed to spread nationwide, but with very few stores as compared to the former. Only they can realize how hard it is to manage the supply chain in this model.
What is ice cream made of?
When we think of ice creams, an image of some creamy, foamy, and sugary stuff" comes to mind. That is exactly what the aim of Unilever ice-cream development lab [was]: to make blocks of foam that were stable at room temperature which could be distributed worldwide and then frozen onsite. The only remaining problem was the bugs – bugs love ice cream, so it still needs to be frozen.
So let us look at the ingredient list of ice cream made by a brand famous for its milk.
Water, Milk Solids, Sugar, Polydextrose, Oligofructose, Fructose, Modified starch, Calcium caseinate, permitted stabilising & emulsifying agents (412, 410, 466, 433, 407) and Sucralose.
Apart from sugar and milk solids, we hardly recognize any ingredient, and that is because they are not used in the kitchen daily (in traditional cooking.) "Milk solids" sounds like milk, but it's not. Hardly anyone knows what a stabilizer is, though the name gives a hint, but we actually don't REALLY know.
Whatever these ingredients are, they surely cater to maximizing profits and spreading the business as far as it. These ingredients help to extend the shelf life, make transportation easy, and profit margins high. Real, whole milk ice cream can NEVER be as solid as what we buy from the market. It will also not be hard and will expire within a few days. The shelf-life of the commercialized ice creams is almost NINE months. Imagine a milk cart that is nine months old!
The emulsifiers are substitutes for eggs- mono- and di-glycerides of fatty acids. Reconstituted milk solids and emulsifiers simply mimic real and expensive ingredients like milk, cream, and egg. Emulsifiers are, on one side fat-soluble and on the other side water soluble. They prevent fat from "splitting". Emulsifiers are carboxymethylcellulose and polysorbate 80. Polysorbate 80, also known as polyoxyethylene sorbitan mono-oleate or E433 (notice in the list), is an entirely synthetic emulsifier. It’s found in lots of kosher pickles, ice cream, aerosols of whipping cream, toothpaste, moisturizing cream, shampoo, and hair dye.
Carboxymethylcellulose – also known as cellulose gum or E466 (also in the list) can be found in all thick and goopy products like mayonnaise, and even in deodorants.
And you better not discover how they are extracted. Remember when our parents said to stop eating fast food because they were made from "bais ka mans"? Let's just say they weren't wrong true. Animal fat was(is) intensively used to make them, but now we have switched to animal fodder. Yes, the animal fat replacement is plant oils, cheap plants that are fed to our beautiful animals. The cheapest possible oils, like palm and soy oils, are hydrogenated to make them solid at room temperature and then make ice cream. So yes, if anyone tells you to not eat ice cream because it has oil in it, they are not wrong.
Stabilizers are stuff like guar gum and sodium alginate. Guar gum, locust bean gum, alginate, carrageenan and the near-ubiquitous xanthan gum -are bacterial exudate: slime that bacteria produce to allow them to cling to surfaces. When you leave water in a bucket overnight and then the bucket seems slimy on the sides, and yellowish, if the bucket is white, it is that bacterial exudate that also "stabilizes" your ice cream at room temperature.
Xanthan gum is one of the most common processed food ingredients. The accumulated gunk in the filter on your dishwasher or laundry is xanthan gum.
These gums can be used to replace more expensive molecules and to give food a longer shelf life. These have led to massive advances in the texture of low-fat – and even zero-fat – products, including dressings and spreads.
Modified starch is the most revolutionary stuff that the food industry has come up with.
Thin your starch with acid, and it’s useful for textiles and laundry.
Treat it with propylene oxide, and get that gloopy feel for salad dressings.
Mix it with phosphoric acid, and improve stability through multiple cycles of freezing and thawing – perfect for pie fillings.
Maltodextrins (a modified starch) give a surface sheen and creaminess to what people think is a ‘milkshake’.
starting 1930s, we saw the use of a paste of corn and arrowroot starches in the production of mayonnaise, ingredients that were much cheaper than eggs or oil, but still gave the same creamy mouth-feel.
All this stuff is extracted from the cheapest possible plants and is further hydrolyzed, bleached, and deodorized.
So, the question arises, Wouldn't it be cheaper to just use authentic ingredients rather than doing all the processing? The partial answer is that, when done on large scales, they ultimately make profit. You can get the complete answer if you check the ingredient list of some contrasting "foods", like frozen pizza and cookie, or frozen fried nuggets and ice cream. By the end of the list, you will find that the ingredients are almost similar! Yes, our food industry has managed to create very contrasting food items from the SAME stuff. A few starches, oils and bacterial waste rule the food industry. Why use expensive varied ingredients when you can treat the hell out of a few cheaply sourced ingredients and make anything? Processing is taking very cheap, fodder like plants, and making edible stuff out of those parts that human beings have not evolved their stomachs for. The repercussions are beyond dangerous, but that is a topic for another day. This all is not to scare you, but to inform you. The decision is yours. Ice cream is obviously not a nutritional necessity and shouldn't but consumed daily anyways.
So will I stop eating ice cream? NO. Will I limit? DEFINITELY. Will I switch to natural home made ice cream? Yeah, that's the plan.
There is a lot more to discuss about, so do look out for follow-up blogs. We haven't dived into additives and flavors yet. ;)
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