all about ice cream

Earlier this week we attended a tour of the University of Connecticut's Dairy Bar, organized by another homeschooling mom. Wow, did we ever get an education about the manufacturing of our favorite summer treat! And we wanted to share our new-found knowledge with you.


Our tour guide, pointing out the steps that go into the ice-cream making process. It actually was less of a tour, more of a "here's how it's done" lecture, and then we were set loose to explore on our own via glass walls surrounding the work spaces. The boys loved the freedom to tour the plant at their own pace, and as a result they came away with a real understanding of how the ice cream gets from the cow to our cones!

These are the pasteurizing vats. The milk comes directly from the dairy on campus in large totes, and is poured into these vats along with the other ingredients (heavy cream, sugar, corn syrup solids, non-fat dry milk, and a stabilizer/emulsifier, in addition to cocoa powder when they are making a chocolate mix). This is where the ingredients are blended, and the mix is heated to 160 deg F. This takes place over a much longer period of time than what is done is typical ice-cream plants, which is why UCONN ice cream has a richer, smoother texture and consistency.

The mixture then heads into the homogenizer, where it is exposed to 2,500 psi of pressure, which causes the fat globules to burst apart and disperse evenly through the mixture. Then the mix is cooled rapidly by a plate heat exchanger, which drops the temperature 40 deg F in about 15 seconds. (This is the equipment that most commercial plants use to pasteurize their ice cream mix as well as cool it, because it is more time efficient than the method UCONN employs.)

Then the mix goes into the 600 gallon storage tank (on the right here) to sit for one day to one week. Resting the mix allows the fat to recrystallize and the stabilizer to hydrate, producing the correct viscosity to the mix.

Next to the storage tank is the flavor tank, and this is where liquid flavors, bases, and coloring is added, 150 gallons at at time, after the resting period.

From the flavor tank, the mix is pumped into the continuous freezer, which chills the mix to 23 to 26 deg F, which is the consistency of soft-serve. It also whips air into the mix, without which the ice cream would freeze so hard that you could break a tooth in it!

This is the stage where ripples (fudge, peanut butter, caramel, etc), candy, cookies, fruit and nuts are added. If they were added before the ice cream was this consistency, they would all just sink to the bottom!

The ice cream is then packed into containers (at UCONN they use 3-gallon and 1/2 gallon containers) and then put in the hardening room, which is a freezer that is constantly -20 deg F (there is no freeze/thaw cycle as there is with a traditional freezer). The ice cream stays there for at least 24 hours before it is ready to move to a tempering cabinet, which is a freezer set at 0 degrees F to help bring the ice cream up to "dipping temperature" (the temperature at which it can be scooped out and served), which is about 8 deg F.

The boys checking out all the equipment. We were actually there on a maintenance day, so we didn't get to see any ice cream being made. They do post a schedule, however, and any visitor to the diary bar can observe the plant in action, so we plan another visit this summer when there is more action going on.

Of course, no Dairy Bar tour is going to be complete without tasting some of the product! Our group of homeschoolers filled the place, and everyone enjoyed the rich, creamy UCONN ice cream!

My boys were no exception. Then again, neither was I. This was my kind of field trip!

We drove around the campus a bit afterwards, and J says he's going to go to this college when he's a teenager. I wonder how much the ice cream had to do with that....