Question: Does ice cream made using liquid nitrogen taste nicer than ordinary ice cream, if so why?

Jemma Rowlandson answered on 15 Jun 2014:

A fantastic question 🙂 liquid nitrogen ice cream actually tastes nicer than ordinary ice-cream for two reasons, it’s smoother and sweeter. This is all to do with how quickly the ingredients are frozen.

It takes a few hours to make normal ice-cream. You stick a mixture of milk, cream and sugar into a freezer and cool it to -12 degrees celsius. Ice crystals form and molecules of sugar and fat stick together in large particles.

With liquid nitrogen ice-cream you quite literally dump a load of liquid nitrogen (almost -300 degrees celsius!) on your ingredients and keep stirring the mixture, it only takes a few minutes to make. They’re frozen so quickly that the ice-crystals, sugar and fat molecules stick together in small particles.

These small particles mean liquid nitrogen ice-cream is much smoother than normal ice cream (which is made of great big lumps of particles). In small particles the sugar and fat molecules, which is what makes ice-cream taste sweet, are also more spread out (rather than being clumped together). The molecules can bounce off the taste buds in your tongue more often, which makes liquid nitrogen ice-cream taste sweeter than normal ice-cream.