Odd Consumer News
Carbonated ice cream. Like the stuff wasn't hard enough to resist already.
Like many great scientific discoveries, Teresa Baker's breakthrough in MIT's grimy Cryogenic Engineering Laboratory last October was punctuated by a memorable exclamation of victory. She raced upstairs from the first-floor lab and announced to her fellow graduate students: ''I made ice cream, come down and eat it!"
Baker's work involves liquid carbon dioxide, bulky stainless steel cylinders, heat exchangers, and vanilla ice cream mix, and it may change the way ice cream is made in the $20 billion-a-year industry. For consumers, the novel device could popularize a new type of frozen dessert that combines the chill of ice cream with the explosive fizz of soda pop.
''It's not ice cream in the usual sense," said John G. Brisson, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ''It has a carbonated bite, and it just kind of goes 'whoof' on your tongue."
Already, Brisson and professor Joseph L. Smith Jr., who both collaborated with Baker, have met with officials from several large ice cream companies -- they won't say which ones -- to demonstrate their technique. They hope to commercialize the apparatus, possibly with a partner. Their product does not yet have a name.
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