What is Ice Cream Before It’s Frozen? Ice Cream Mix!

When an ice cream manufacturer starts the process of making our favorite frozen treat, they start with something called “ice cream mix”. Ice cream mix is a blend of cream, milk, sugars, dairy powders, and possibly emulsifiers and stabilizers. When mixed, it looks like a thick paste, but tastes like sweet milk – essentially like melted ice cream!

Have you ever wondered how ice cream is made? Well, you’re about to find out!

The first step of making ice cream is gathering all the ingredients and mixing them in. The liquid ingredients, like cream, skim milk, and any liquid sugars are added to a tank. Dry ingredients, like sugar or dry dairy powders, are run through what is called a ‘powder horn.’ Then, stabilizers and emulsifiers are also added. In this step, it’s important for the dry ingredients to be mixed well with the liquid ingredients, similar to how you mix an egg and oil in your brownie mix at home.

Next, the ice cream mix is pasteurized to make sure it is safe to eat. There are legally defined combinations of times and temperatures that can be used to ensure the mix is safe to consume!

After pasteurization, the mix is homogenized. As the name implies, homogenizing is a step to make the ice cream mix “homogenous”, or, in other words, to make tiny droplets that have the same amount of ingredients in them. Without this step, some ingredients might settle to the bottom or rise to the top, and the ice cream texture wouldn’t be consistent.

After the mix is homogenized, it cools down quickly, as the pasteurizing and homogenizing really heats everything up. The mix then “ages” for a few hours, up to a day. This is an important step to allow the mix to sit so it’s ready to be turned into ice cream.

If the aged mix is going to be flavored, like mint ice cream, for example, it is typically pumped over to a mix tank where the flavors are added. Then, the mix is frozen. After freezing the mix, additional mix-in inclusions are added. Using Mint Moose Tracks as an example, this would be where Moose Tracks Fudge and the delicious mint cups are added.

Now you’re an expert! Ice cream mix is a small but mighty part of ice cream manufacturing, and without it, we would not be able to enjoy ice cream whenever we wanted to! Can you imagine, a world without Moose Tracks? We can’t!

Do you want to learn more details about how ice cream is made? Read part two of this blog titled, How is Ice Cream Made in a Factory.