Boston
NO NEED to worry about leaving your ice cream in the freezer. Add a simple
wheat extract and it won鈥檛 get that horrible grainy texture from hanging around
the fridge too long.
Douglas Goff and his colleagues at the University of Guelph in Canada looked
at a class of proteins from winter wheat that help the plant survive the cold.
The proteins bind onto the faces of small ice crystals and stop them from
growing into large, rectangular crystals. It鈥檚 these sharp crystals that can
make your smooth ice cream feel like a mouthful of snow.
Advertisement
Goff鈥檚 team grow winter wheat seedlings at low temperatures so that they
churn out large quantities of the protein. They harvest the wheat, isolate the
proteins and add them to the ice cream. It鈥檚 a cheap answer, says Goff, because
you only need a small amount of protein. The ideal concentration is less than
one-tenth of a millilitre in a litre tub of ice cream.
Goff says he has still to perfect his technique. The proteins tend to bind to
only one face of the ice crystals, so some crystals can continue to grow. But
he鈥檚 confident he can solve the problem by using specially designed vats that
mix the proteins evenly throughout the ice cream, helping them to bind to
multiple crystal faces.
His is not the first attempt to alter the freezing properties of ice cream:
other researchers have suggested using antifreeze proteins from Arctic fish or
insects. But Goff says people are more likely to accept his protein because it鈥檚
vegetarian.