When you freeze the ice cream after it melts from store bought and becomes completely liquid, it doesn’t stay the same way. It just isn’t ice cream anymore, there’s no cream, it becomes like frozen ice lolly kinda texture; completely different from the texture it comes in ie. Soft, fluffy, milky, creamy.
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Ice cream is dairy. When it gets even *warm*, it becomes a Petri dish for bacteria and other unfun things. When it melts entirely, it’s going to make you *terribly* sick to eat, even if you refreeze it.
Don’t eat melted ice cream. It’s bad
When you make ice cream it is churned constantly while it freezes. Ice cream makers also have blades that scrape the ice off the inside walls of the vessel since that freezes first. Keeping all the ice cream moving like this as it freezes keeps the ice crystals that form very small. The small ice crystals is what gives fresh ice cream that smooth texture. When the ice cream has melted and is then refrozen you get much larger ice crystals, which is why it kinda has the texture of a bad snow cone now.
When ice cream is being produced, during the freezing process it’s churned to break up the ice crystals as they form, which means it’s not a solid block of ice, it’s made up of thousands of tiny ice crystals.
If you freeze it without churning, you get a solid block of frozen cream.
It’s kind of the same concept as ice vs snow.
Also, commercially made ice cream has a certain percentage of air ‘whipped’ into it. It’s known as “overrun” and increases the volume while decreasing the weight. More air = more profit.
Melting eliminates this texture, in addition to the other points mentioned above.
When it’s being made, it’s frozen (1) VERY fast and (2) while being churned. Both of those things promote forming many tiny ice crystals rather than fewer larger ones. When you refreeze melted ice cream you have much slower freezing and no agitation so you get big crunchy ice crystals forming rather than micro fluffy ones.
The person saying it’s like snow vs ice is spot on. It’s all about particle size!
never tried it but put it back in an ice cream maker and refreeze it. You can’t just put it in a freezer. It is a whipped product. When it is melted it is no longer whipped. Cheap ice cream is over half air.
Everyone here is getting excited about ice crystals. The truth is there is a massive amount of air whipped into commercial ice cream. Air makes it seem “creamy” without having to put in all that pesky cream. And there’s enough gums, sugars and stabilizers in commercial ice cream to limit the ice crystals.
How do I know this? because I’ve eaten plenty of re-frozen ice cream and it had shrank to half the original size of the tub and it wasn’t crystalline at all.
Because most ice creams and 50% air. When metled the air seperates and the volume drastically decreases as the consistency is now a soup. That’s why they are measures in litres and not grams, because it’s the big ice cream scam.
Just to add: when ice cream freezes as it’s being made, any bacteria in there go into a state of suspended animation. When ice cream thaws, the bacteria comes out of that state and goes absolutely ape shit multiplying, far far quicker than before they went into that state. When you freeze it again, you’ve got a hive of suspended bacteria. So never eat refrozen ice cream, it will get you.
Edit: spelling
Air. You are basically freezing a foam. Creating an emulsion of air within the liquid as it freezes. The cream is helpful in this part. Or the oils in dairy free ice creams. It stabilize this air emulsion. The size of the crystals will be smaller as well because of the air interface. The sugar used also helps in making the crystals smaller. So this means that the ice cream will be soft although it is frozen. Because the tiny crystals are not completely attached to each other.
So if you have a pint of ice cream and you leave it over the counter, when it’s liquid, the volume will be less than the full pint. Depending on the type of ice cream, it could be between 25%-50% lol ess than the proper ice cream
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