04_How It's Made Ice Cream Treats

Before refrigeration, ice-cream was a hand made luxury, ingredients went into a mixing bowl, inside a tub filled with ice and salt water. The salt help the ice absorb heat, cooling the mixture to below freezing. In the 1920s, commercial freezers made mass production possible and the ice-cream industry was born. To make ice-cream treats, you first have to make the ice-cream. It all begins with fresh cream. The factory stores it in the refrigerated silos set just a few degrees above freezing. The silos be the high speed mixer that blends the cream with other ingredients. The main dry ingredients are powdered skim milk and plant base stabilizers and emulsifiers. Stabilizers prevent the ice-cream from crystallizing. And emulsifiers allow the mix to bond with air during the whipping process. The other ingredients are sugar and corn syrup. After about 3 minutes of mixing, a pumping system moves the mixture into a pasteurization tanks and heats it to a hundred and sixty-two degrees for half an hour, killing any bacteria and activating the stabilizers. Then, the factory homogenizes the mixture a process that breaks up the fat globules giving the ice cream a smooth texture. The mixture is cooled and concentrated with a lil flavoring is added. Then, the concoction is chilled and wiped for about 15 seconds, wiping blends the mix with air transforming it from a liquid to a soft solid. Without air the finished product, would come out looking like frozen milk rather than ice-cream. The ice-cream sandwich wafers are made of chocolate cake ingredients. A filling machine feeds two lines of wafers toward an injection pipe. Just as two wafers come together the machine adjust third of a cup of vanilla ice-cream in between. The pipes edge shapes the ice-cream into a rectangular slab that it fits perfectly between the wafers. All this happens at a rate of 140 ice-cream sandwiches per minute. As the sandwiches move on to packaging the filling is still ice cold from the freezing phase. So, there's no threat of a melt down. The packaging system raises each sandwich into a wrapper then fold and tucks the ends. The next machine counts the sandwiches and inserts them in the boxes. Once sealed, the boxes go directly into a storage freezer at minus 22 degrees. On another line, ice cream cone production is underway. A feeder drops pre wrap sugar cones in the holders on container belt. Sprayers coats the insides with chocolaty layer, which adds a flavor and creates a barrier between the cone and ice-cream. So, the cone remains crispy until you eat it. Next, nozzles squirt in the ice-cream filling. One production line, two flavors. One row of cones gets vanilla ice-cream the other row chocolate. Now, for tasty surprise in the cones core an injection of liquid caramel This factory also makes ice-cream cones with chocolate and strawberry sauce inside. Next, a chocolate flavored liquid topping. Then the crunchy finishing touch a layer of chocolaty coated puffed rice. Finally, the cones move under a lid dispenser that applies a wax coated paper lid to each one. A heating element instantly melts the wax ceiling the lid the cone's paper sleeve. From here, the ice-cream cones go into boxes. Then, straight into the freezer, ready to take a licking.