News In Science: Dippin' Dots

Carissa Stimpfel
COR-210
Brandenburg
12/11/08
News in Science: Dippin’ Dots

Chances are, if you’ve been to a movie theater, at one point or another, you’ve had Dippin’ Dots. If you haven’t, you’re really missing something. Small, round balls of cryogenically frozen ice cream that has to be kept at a temperature of -20 degrees Fahrenheit and coming in flavors such as Banana Split, Bubblegum, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Cookies & Cream with Oreo, Cotton Candy, and your good old-fashioned Chocolate, Vanilla and Strawberry—they taste like nothing else.
Labeled “the ice cream of the future”, Dippin’ Dots takes on a whole new ice cream-eating experience. You can pour them into a cup, eat them slowly, even play with the beads. However, because of the extreme temperature they need to be stored in, Dippin’ Dots are not sold in regular supermarkets or are widely available. Movie theaters seem to be the best place to find them, short of at one of the few Dippin’ Dots franchise stores in the U.S.
In 1988, microbiologist Curt Jones got the idea to combine his family’s ice cream recipe with liquid nitrogen, which flash-freezes the ice cream into small beads, locking in the flavor and texture and making the ice cream less susceptible to quickly melting or sticking together. This process is known as cryogenically freezing—you may have heard it used in science-fiction articles in regards to freezing people like Walt Disney. Same basic theory. To be cryogenically frozen, something must be frozen at under -75 degrees. By cryogenically freezing something, texture, taste, and moisture are locked in better than if the food was to be traditionally frozen. Traditional freezing requires quick thawing with loss of water retention, where cryogenically freezing things does not.
This is a revolutionary idea because not many of our current foods are cryogenically frozen. Although it is a longer and more involved process than traditional freezing and requires both liquid nitrogen and special machinery, it’s important because it can and could be used more commercially to keep foods fresher longer. Also, there has been some testing and speculation done with cryogenics to see if they could freeze to later resuscitate humans, hence the Walt Disney theory. In the meantime though , Dippin’ Dots remain a fun novelty.

http://www.cryogenicsociety.org/resources/cryo_central/food_processing/
http://www.dippindots.com/company/faqs/