I've got these two friends named Ben and Jerry. We were texting back and forth recently when Ben reminded me of a rather important holiday and then Jerry sent along a video. Hey Nick, Happy National Ice Cream Month, Baby! Want to come up and see how ice cream is made? I say we go make some ice cream and before we go if we have any new friends here today, we're trying to catch up to Gordon in subscribers so go hit that button below. Here at the factory, we start every tour with ringing the cowbell. Do you want to ring the cowbell? I've got to have more cowbell! This is our original factory that we opened in 1986. We can produce somewhere between 300,000 to 400,000 pints of ice cream a day here. That's insane. Step one is our blend tanks. This is where we're going to make the base mix for ice cream. Every single flavor is going to start with that same base mix. Are there any secrets in the recipe itself? Because we know KFC , for instance, they'll protect at all costs their recipe. Are there secrets here? It has MSG, right? Excuse me? It has MSG in it? Move up, please. Okay, thank you. They've been extremely well trained to not give away any information. Are there secrets? That's a good question for later. Step two is our pasteurizer and our homogenizer. This is to make the ice cream safe. Safe to eat and super creamy. Step three we've got our flavor vats and this is where each flavor of ice cream is going to start to get its own personality. So the flavors here have personality. Step four is the first freezing process. The product is going to go from 36 degrees Fahrenheit to 22 degrees Fahrenheit. So the 22 degrees Fahrenheit is going to be the consistency of soft serve ice cream. We're also going to whip in some air. We call it our dairy air. Step five is our chunk feeder. This is where we're going to add in those big chunks that Ben and Jerry's is known for. He's about to dump an entire box of chunks and there's an arm inside that machine that then spins and as that arm spins it incorporates those chunks into the ice cream. So step six is the swirl pump. How is it being swirled into there? The swirl is going to get inserted into the pint of ice cream as it's getting filled with the ice cream. So it kind of just goes in together and goes like this? Yes, so those pints spin as they get filled. Step seven is our automatic filler. This is where we're going to fill those pints of ice cream. We do about 275 times in a minute. You see those white pipes out there? They're not actually white. That's just where the ice cream's going through. No way! That's frost on the outside. How does it not stop and freeze inside those pipes? It's because it's at 22 degrees Fahrenheit. It's at that soft serve consistency. Okay, it's at that perfect milky, soft serve consistency. Yeah. So it flows right through. Yes! After those pints are filled, lids are going to get placed on top of them. They do a little flip to land on their head. OHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! So when they're traveling to the freezer they're more stable this way. So after those pints get filled, they're going to head to our spiral hardener which is these two and a half-story-tall freezer that's corkscrew-shaped. And they're just slowly going up this spiral that kind of moves them upwards until they're eventually cooled from this soft serve consistency down to the hard Ben and Jerry's that you normally have? Yes! Is there any shot we can try some of this soft serve right out of the white tubes before it gets frozen like that? Yeah, let's see what we can do. You guys hear that echo, that fan noise going? It's kind of like a scary noise, yeah. That's the spiral hardener going. That's the freezer where all the pints are getting frozen solid. We're going to taste the ice cream before it gets to that step though, so wait right here. Alright, so I grabbed these off the line for you guys. This is fresh ice cream. It's a soft serve consistency before it's even gone through the freezer. So like we just said, we're getting the exclusive taste right now of the ice cream right off the line. It's almost like cutting into a steak whether it's going to be medium rare or not. I'm actually really excited about this. I mean that looks pretty good. How long ago was this running through those tubes in there? Minutes ago. Minutes ago and it is perfect soft serve ice cream. I actually like soft serve better than- is it called hard serve ice cream? Hard ice cream. Not hard serve? Nope. It's hard ice cream. Why is it soft serve and then hard? This does look fantastic. It's really good. I feel like it even tastes a lot different. The temperature of that ice cream that you're eating right now is warmer than what it would be in your home freezer so it tastes better. I'm not supposed to have lactose. There are some employees that have worked for Ben and Jerry's for like 20 years that haven't tried this. This is the ultimate eating experience of our ice cream. It's so creamy. Oh! That's so creamy! Manny, how did you get my I.D.?! I'm sorry! Here. We just finished our ice cream tasting and we will soon be heading to make our own Ben and Jerry's ice cream. But it's time for a quick game. I'm standing in a hall of the 10 most popular flavors in the U.S. I'm going to show you the top three and we'll see who can guess in the comments below which is the number one most popular flavor. Your choices are half-baked, Chocolate Fudge Brownie, or my favorite Cherry Garcia. Now that you've got your answer. Number three is chocolate fudge brownie, number two, Cherry Garcia, and apparently half-baked is the most popular flavor out there. Before you leave you've got to take some swag with you. Anything you want, it's on us. Really? Yeah! Okay! You look cute, man. We are now headed to a separate facility to make some homemade Ben and Jerry's ice cream of our own. And during this drive, we'll take a moment of silence to remember all the flavors from the flavor graveyard that have been lost. So first off, tell me where we are. We are at the Ben and Jerry's favorite lab. The flavor lab! Is your actual title at Ben and Jerry's the '"Flavor Guru"? That is correct. It's probably the coolest job title you can possibly ever have. So what we're about to do is make our own flavor of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. We've already had the base made from the factory we were at this morning. What goes in here? It's just eggs, cream, sugar. So from here what do we do? We come here and we just think "What is the best thing that we can put in the ice cream?" That's how ice cream starts. I have chosen Parmesan because I know that you love Parmesan. So I have made some Parmesan crisps. Did you grate it out of a full Parmesan wheel? We don't have access to the wheels, sorry. You're kidding? No, it was like $3,000. Are you messing with me? Now, we've got basil, fresh basil, of course. It smells really good. Lemon zest, you've already started to zest it here. This is just graham cracker butter base. It's like peanut butter but graham crackers. So we're going to start by infusing this base here, this ice cream base, with basil. Sometimes people clap the basil together, right? Yeah! We're steeping this basil inside the ice cream base here to get all that flavor in there. It's the same way we would with chicken bones for a broth. Yeah. Just like normal cooking, we want to taste and season as we go. We haven't gotten enough of that basil flavor in there yet, so we'll leave that off to the side to infuse. So we are making our swirl right now. And to start out, we're going to go in with some of these Parmesan crisps. Yeah. And we crush them up. And quite literally, one of the best snacks ever is just shaving some parmesan into these small little discs, baking them on a sheet until they're nice, crispy, golden brown like this. That's right. I could eat them all day. I can do this all day. And so the next ingredient in will be some of this graham cracker swirl. This might be starting to get a little weird, but I like it. The next thing to do is we're going to bag it up. So the little good trick when you're filling one of these piping bags is to fold back the top and if I make a little mess over here, it's okay because we can fold it back. Yes, you can fold it in. Last scoop. I got a little drawer freezer here. And we'll keep it cool. Now that things are finished off for our swirl we're at a good point there. We can keep snacking, that's one thing that happens here. And now we go back to our infusion. Manny, want to try? Oh, wow. That's interesting. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to strain it. That way we get just the base. We're going to need it all. That's a lot of basil. That would have been nasty. That's like the beauty of working with real ingredients. You get to control what you're putting into your ice cream. Then we're going to go to our machine which takes six minutes to make six pints. That is fun. The next step for us is to freeze the ice cream. Six minutes on the timer. Now we're moving on to the third and final step of creating our ice cream flavor which is the chunks: shortbread cookies and blondie brownies. So our ice cream, once it comes out of the freezer, is going to come straight here. That is extremely cold. Manny, put your hands on this. -10 degrees Fahreinheit. Totally serious. Oh my gosh! Let's load it up! Salt Bae! ... Everybody betrayed me. Okay, we got ice cream. This is one of the best experiences you will ever have in your life. Smooth and creamy ice cream. That's really good. So once the ice cream is finished with all the chunks in there, we scoop it right into a pastry bag. The ice cream is so light and kind of airy. That's the smoothest the ice cream is going to ever be. So we have finished all three components and now we're on the final step? I think that actually, July is Ice Cream Month! National Ice Cream Month? And I think you got your very own pint! No way! Your very own Ben and Jerry's pint. Manny, what do you think? That's really cool. And naturally, we have to fill our own pint, right? Yes! We've just created our own flavor. Unfortunately, this is not an official Ben and Jerry's flavor. We just made this for today. Just for today. Today only! Or maybe someday. Cheers! Cheers! When we started making this, I wasn't entirely sure about it. We put some sweet stuff. We put parmesan crackers with the basil. It seemed a little all over the place but then you taste it and it's actually really good. How would you guys name it? Name it in the comments below. We'll see what the name of this ice cream would be and as a reminder, we had basil, lemon, parmesan crisps, graham cracker, blondies, and shortbread. Give it a good name and maybe it will become a real flavor someday. Hey, check it out! This is insane.
