Children eat ice cream that's melting fast at the annual horse fair Appleby-in-Westmorland, Britain.
Scientists at the University of Edinburgh are out to fix one of the most vexing problems in the world: The melting ice cream cone.
“We’re not talking about ice cream that doesn’t melt at all, we’re talking about ice cream that melts more slowly than you would typically expect from a scoop of ice cream sitting on top of an ice cream cone for example,” says Kate MacPhee, a professor of biological physics in the Institute of Condensed Matter and Complex Systems at the University of Edinburgh.
MacPhee’s latest research involves ice cream, in particular, a naturally-occurring protein known as BsIA that works by binding together the air, fat and water in ice cream. The result is ice cream that stays frozen for longer.
“It’s not [a protein] that can cause you any harm, and that protein stabilizes the ice cream and slows down the melting process,” she says.
The researchers have dubbed the protein a “bacterial raincoat,” because it sticks to fat droplets and air bubbles, making them more stable as a mixture.
“That’s what you have in ice cream,” says MacPhee. “You have an oil and a sugar-syrup mixture, and you have air in there to keep it light and allow you to scoop it up, and you also have the solid surfaces, which are the ice crystals in there, so our protein can stabilize all of those.”
It turns out stabilizing the ingredients of ice cream slows the melting process and also prevents gritty ice crystals from forming, says MacPhee. The result is a smooth and creamy ice cream cone that holds up as much as 10 minutes longer on a hot day. "We're excited by the potential this new ingredient has for improving ice-cream, for consumers and for manufacturers,” says MacPhee. Clearly the practical implications of this research are huge.
“We can predict then that children should be able to get all the way through an ice cream cone without it dribbling all down the sides, which I think will be a bonus to parents all around the world.”