ng] NARRATOR: It's
everyone's favorite-- big time, small time-- MAN: Love it. NARRATOR: --anytime. Whether it's vanilla,
chocolate, or whatever-- PETER LIND: Think we need
some M&Ms. How about brownies? Sure, all right, why not? NARRATOR: --we've got the scoop
on this centuries-old dessert in all of its flavorful forms. That's good. [smacks lips] That's a 10. NARRATOR: From the cow-- [mooing] --to the cone, it's the untold
story of ice cream on "Modern Marvels." [theme music] [music playing] NARRATOR: Welcome to a world
like none you've ever seen, a magical land of ice cream
floats, chocolate water balls, and frozen fantasies. "Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory" ain't got nothing on us. NARRATOR: This is the
Dreyer's plant in Bakersfield, California, the world's largest
and busiest ice cream factory. Each year, the 28
production lines churn out 90 different
ice cream products, totaling over 100
million gallons. That helps satisfy the world's
four-billion-gallon-a-year appetite. Not surprisingly,
one of the leaders is the good, old USA, where
the average person downs 23.2 quarts a year. Mm. NARRATOR: We're all kids
when it comes to ice cream. We all love it, you know. It's comfort food. You've had a bad day,
have a bowl of ice cream. You've had a good day, celebrate
with a bowl of ice cream. NARRATOR: Today,
ice cream production is a sophisticated and
technologically advanced science, but the same basic
principles from hundreds of years ago still apply. The way we make ice cream
in the manufacturing scale is the same way that you would
make ice cream at home in a hand-turned freezer. The differences are
obviously we do it in scale and a
continuous process rather than a batch
process at home. NARRATOR: The process begins
with ice cream's most important ingredient, milk. The total liquid
supply of this facility is about a half a
million gallons. So we take those basic
ingredients of milk, condensed milk, and cream
coupled with sugars, and that makes the base mix. And we'll also add in cocoa
powders and stabilizers into the mixture. NARRATOR: Once the
mix has been blended it's piped to the
pasteurizer, where it's heated to 179 degrees for
25 seconds to kill bacteria. Then it's homogenized,
forced through tiny valves at a pressure of 4,000 pounds
per square inch to break down and disperse the fat globules. Just like putting
your thumb over a hose, it aspirates that
mix and creates a very consistent or
homogeneous product. NARRATOR: The product is
then cooled to 40 degrees before being pumped into
the various flavor tanks. We'll add in the cherry flavor
or the strawberry flavoring. And as we get into
the freezer, now is where we begin to
create the ice cream. NARRATOR: The flavored
mix is continuously pumped into the freezer and
enters a long, cold cylinder that is jacketed by a liquid
ammonia freezing agent. The temperature of the mix
drops to 21 to 23 degrees. As the mix freezes to the
walls of the cylinder, ice crystals are scraped
off by the revolving blades of a paddle called the dasher. The blades have an
additional purpose-- whipping air into the mix,
creating the frozen foam we know as ice cream. One of the largest
ingredients inside ice cream that most people don't
know is actually air. We call it overrun. Premium products are required
to have 100% overrun. So for every 1 cup of mix,
we add one cup of air. NARRATOR: In the US, ice cream
must by definition contain at least 10% butter fat. When it's pumped
out of the freezer it has the consistency
of soft serve, but that won't last for long. The cartons next head
into the blast harder, kept at a bone-chilling
65 degrees below zero. Within hours, the ice
cream's temperature will drop to 0
degrees Fahrenheit. A blast harder
is really intended to draw all that heat out
of it as fast as we can, because the colder we can get
it the faster we can get it, the less probability we have
of creating ice crystals in the product. And ice crystals are really
what create that grittiness feel in your mouth. So ice cream manufacturing is
all about time and temperature. NARRATOR: Not to mention taste. And no one knows that better
than Dreyer's official taste tester, John Harrison,
a man whose tongue is so sensitive it's been
insured for a million dollars. What I look for in tasting
ice cream is three things. Now, we all initially
eat with our eyes, so it must look appetizing. Number two is the flavor
and flavor balance. And thirdly is the
body and texture. NARRATOR: John's job is to make
sure that each carton lives up to its premium label in terms
of taste and presentation. Sort of like a wine taster,
I start with the white wines of ice cream-- vanilla,
French vanilla, vanilla bean, double vanilla, and I work my
way up to the heavy Bordeaux of ice cream, such as black
walnut, mint chocolate chip. NARRATOR: When
tasting ice cream, John uses a
gold-plated spoon that doesn't leave an aftertaste. [smacks lips] Pure vanilla. Mm. My tasting method is the three
S's, which stands for swirl, smack, and spit. Mm. Whoo. That's good. Cookies and cream. You don't have to
swallow to taste. We swallow to get nutrition. Get the cream, the cookies-- [smacks lips]
--vanilla, sweetness. [smacks lips] As you can see, I've been
swallowing more than I should. [laughs] It's so good though. NARRATOR: The ice
cream giant's tasting is very different from the
world's first ice cream. I wish I could tell you
ice cream was invented on this day with this
person, but the fact is we don't really know where
ice cream was invented or when. We do know that there's lots
of myths and legends around ice cream. NARRATOR: Many believe the
Emperor Nero would send slaves into the mountains to bring
back snow and ice for snow ice cream made with wine,
fruit, and honey. Another legend has Marco
Polo returning from China with a recipe for a
sherbet-like dessert. Ice cream as we know
and love it today really has its roots in Italy, where
they call their ice cream gelato. The Italians really perfected
ice cream in their cafes, in high society. We can thank the
Italians for that. NARRATOR: Compared to
American ice cream, gelato contains less
fat and less added air. As a result, it has a
rich, creamier taste. [speaking japanese] JON SNYDER: Gelato varies
from region to region, and even within a city you can
have something very different. It's like rosewater. But the Italians do tend to
use more milk and less cream than American-style ice cream. NARRATOR: John Snyder is
America's gelato guru. At Il Laboratorio del Gelato
on New York's Lower East Side, he creates this centuries-old
dessert for more than 200 of Manhattan's
finest restaurants. Today, we're going to
be making espresso gelato. And we begin with just
pure espresso beans. We use about a gallon
of espresso beans for one batch of gelato. And this goes right in the
blender with the beans. NARRATOR: Next,
John adds 2 gallons of a base mix consisting
of milk, cream, and sugar. He then blends the mixture and
heats it, infusing the beans into the mix. And just let this come to
almost a boil, but not quite. NARRATOR: An hour later, it's
time to strain out the beans. John then adds a little
fresh brewed coffee to the bean and milk
concoction and pours it into a gelato machine for
churning and freezing. 3 additional gallons of base
mix round out the recipe. Well, the recipes
that I've created are based on years
of a lot of tasting, my travels all over the world. We try and make just the very
best and also the very purest. And I can start taking it out. NARRATOR: 20 minutes
later, it's gelato time. This gelato will give you
a pretty good jolt. Espresso, the best way to start your day. NARRATOR: It's doubtful whether
America's founding fathers started their days off
with espresso gelato, but they did enjoy
their ice cream. George Washington was a fan. Thomas Jefferson had a
weakness for vanilla. And Dolley Madison served
it at her husband's second inauguration. But it was the invention of the
salt and ice hand-cranked batch freezer in 1846 by
housewife Nancy Johnson that turned ice cream
into a household food that everyone could enjoy. That old homemade
method is still revered at Penn State
University, the country's leading authority on
the making of ice cream. We'll use this demonstration
with the salt and ice freezer to demonstrate the basic
principles that underlie freezing of ice cream
mix into ice cream. The freezing cylinder will be
charged to be roughly half full of ice cream mix. Then the scraping
mechanism is inserted into the freezing system. Now, this freezer is very
similar to the freezer that Nancy Johnson developed
in 1846, except that we have an electric motor rather
than a hand crank. NARRATOR: Salt and ice are added
to act as the freezing agent. They form a brine solution,
which has a very low freezing point. As the brine absorbs
heat from the ice cream mix in the cylinder, the
mix itself begins to freeze. DR. BOB ROBERTS: And you'll
notice that in this system the scraper mechanism is
fixed, and the cylinder rotates around the
scraper mechanism here. NARRATOR: 45 minutes later,
the ice cream is ready. DR. BOB ROBERTS:
Oh, and you can see that this is whipped up nicely. If you look carefully,
you can see little-- little balls. And you'll see this
kind of stringiness. A part of this is due to
the ice, and part of this is also due to destabilized fat
that's in the ice cream because of the long, slow
churning process. But this is truly
homemade ice cream. NARRATOR: While most of
today's ice cream makers have abandoned the
old-fashioned methods, tradition lives on at
Graeter's, a family-run business in Cincinnati. We are the only
ice cream company, I think, anywhere in the
world that uses the French pot method of making ice cream. If you Google French pot,
you'll find us and nobody else. NARRATOR: Graeter's is a
fourth-generation company that has been making ice cream
the same basic way for more than 130 years. The process begins with pouring
2 gallons of ice cream mix into one of Graeter's
unique French pots. This is a very similar
ice cream freezer to what we started with in 1870. It's been modernized
slightly, mechanicalized in modern refrigeration. What it consists of is a
5-gallon stainless steel drum submerged in calcium chloride. NARRATOR: As the
pot slowly spins, the mix begins to freeze
against its sides. A blade softly scrapes the
sides, folding the ice cream into itself. This folding
process prevents air from whipping into the
ice cream and accounts for its thick and
creamy consistency. The reason no one else
uses the French pot today is it's so labor intensive. You can only make 2
gallons per machine. And modern ice cream
machines, even the small ones, will make 10 gallons
in 10 minutes. NARRATOR: After 15
minutes of spinning the ice cream is
ready to be packed, but it's so dense that no
equipment can handle it. All of our pints
are hand packed. There is no
automation back there. Our packing machine
is named Bud. We pack about 6,000 pints
that way on a daily basis. NARRATOR: Where a
typical pint of ice cream may weigh as little as 8
ounces, a Graeter's pint weighs nearly a full pound. The unique thing about
Graeter's ice cream is it is just like what your
great-grandparents would have had over 100 years ago. We are literally the only people
in the world that continue to use the French pot
process to make ice cream, and we're still making it
just 2 gallons at a time. NARRATOR: By the late 1800s,
people were getting their ice cream at mom and
pop soda fountains like this one, Aglamesis
Brothers in Cincinnati. When you walk into a nostalgic
ice cream parlor like this, you're really coming back to
a place that doesn't really exist anymore on this planet. NARRATOR: This shop is only one
of a handful of soda fountains that remains from the period. This is the authentic
ice cream fountain that we've had since this
building was built in 1913. Our formulas are
actually the same as they were many
years ago in respect to cream, honey, eggs
and sugar in our product. What flavor do you like? Colorwise. NARRATOR: The late 1800s
ushered in an era of ice cream innovations, among them a
colorful combination that included ice cream, flavored
toppings, and whipped cream-- the ice cream sundae. More than half a
dozen communities claim to be its birthplace,
everywhere from Two Rivers, Wisconsin, where a historical
marker commemorates the event-- The community has
always taken great pride in the history of being
home of the ice cream sundae invented by one Ed Berners
at his ice cream parlor in the Franklin House
building in 1881. NARRATOR: --to
Ithaca, New York-- The story that's
claimed in Ithaca is that the sundae was invented
in 1892 at Colt and Platt's Pharmacy. There is no documentation
for the Berners story and several pieces of
documentation for the Ithaca story. NARRATOR: --to
Evanston, Illinois. One pharmacist in Evanston,
according to legend, decided to serve ice
cream with syrup on Sunday as a way of driving sales. And out of respect
for the Lord's name, he changed the spelling
from D-A-Y to D-A-E. NARRATOR: We may never know who
really invented the ice cream sundae, but we do know
every sundae needs a dish. And if you don't
have a dish, you'd better have ice cream's most
trusted companion, the cone. NARRATOR: For hundreds
of years, ice cream was content to go it
alone, served up in dishes, bowls, and glasses. But since the turn
of the 20th century, it's been married to
the perfect partner. That would be the cone, a
wonderful little invention with but one purpose. Cones are really a vehicle
just to eat ice cream. So you don't buy cones unless
you're buying ice cream. NARRATOR: And by
the looks of things, people are buying a
whole lot of ice cream. This is the Joy Cone
Company in Hermitage, Pennsylvania, the world's
largest ice cream cone plant. Every year, Joy Cone turns out
a staggering 1.5 billion cones. That's over five and 1/2
million cones every day-- amazing when you consider the
genesis of the first cone. There's a couple different
competing theories, but the one that we adhere
to is the 1904 World's Fair was in St. Louis, and
there was two vendors. One was making waffles,
and the person next to him was selling scoops of
ice cream in a dish. Well, the ice cream
vendor ran out of dishes, and so the waffle cone
vendor folded the waffle into a conical shape. And so they started serving the
ice cream inside the waffle, and it was developed
as the waffle cone. NARRATOR: Waffle
cones are still being made at Joy Cone,
as are sugar cones and the crispy,
flat-bottomed cake cones. A cake cone is made with
some basic ingredients-- flour, tapioca flour, water, sugar,
and then minor ingredients. NARRATOR: The ingredients
are dumped into a mixer, cooled, and then pumped as a
liquid batter into the ovens. With the cake cones,
it's a molded product. Batter is formed into
the mold, and then a plug drops into the mold. So the batter forms between
the cavity and the plug. Goes in liquid. 90 seconds later, it'll drop
out as a fully formed cone. And as you can see, we're
making color cups today. The cones come out of the
oven at about 350 degrees, and they come down this conveyor
to cool off before they're packed onto the conveyor. This oven is going
to generate over 120,000 cones in a single
day and the whole line over 700,000 cones in one day. NARRATOR: Quality
control is never a problem at Joy Cone with CEO
Joe George working the floor. You want it to be well
baked without being burnt in any spot. And you want it to be soft in
texture without being too weak. And it's got to taste good. And this one passes the test. NARRATOR: Unlike the
molded cake cones, sugar cones and waffle
cones are rolled products, baked flat in the oven. Once they're warm and
malleable, they're dropped upon a spinner that
forms the actual cone shape. This is our
sugar cone machine, which produces 10,000 cones an
hour or 240,000 cones a day. When we make all these
cones, we want to make sure it's excellent taste. But we also need to make
sure it's a nice, sealed tip, because we want to make sure
that you're eating the ice cream and not wearing it. Now you try it. NARRATOR: The folks
at Baskin-Robbins have turned filling ice
cream cones into an art form. There you go. NARRATOR: All workers are
trained in the proper technique for making the
perfect 4-ounce scoop. Not too bad. One of our Baskin-Robbins
franchisees, Mitch Cohen from New York,
holds "The Guinness Book of World Record" for the most
scoops successfully executed and applied to a
cone in one minute. He did 19 of them. Now we're going to
make the perfect scoop using the Baskin-Robbins
custom ice cream scoop. Want to get in there,
get a big chunk, get the ice cream to roll
around inside the scoop, make a second pass at
it to tighten it up, bring it back, apply it firmly
but gently to this cone, and there you go,
perfect ice cream scoop. NARRATOR: And how many licks
does it take to put away a scoop of ice cream? Who better to ask than
John Harrison, the man with a million dollar tongue? A typical cone, one scoop,
looking at 4 fluid ounces, it takes about 50
licks to polish off that scoop of ice cream. [energetic music] NARRATOR: We decided to put
that number to the test. [music playing] This lucky lady needed 100
licks and a half dozen bites. But ice cream consumption can
have its headaches, literally. At Penn State University, we
learned about the most common, the dreaded brain freeze. After the ice
cream is taken in and comes in contact with
the upper palate of the mouth it constricts these
blood vessels, and it restricts
the flow of blood. A few seconds later
the palate is rewarmed, and these blood vessels
dilate, and the blood returns to normal. At this point the blood
rush back to the palate is rather significant,
and the nerve endings in the upper roof of the
mouth sense this as pain. So it's not the ingestion
of the cold ice cream. It's actually the
return of the warmth after the ice
cream is swallowed. And this pain then
is transferred to the forehead as a very
severe but brief headache. NARRATOR: And the
cure for the freeze? I would recommend taking
smaller portions at a time, or licking smaller portions
of ice cream off the cone, or eating it from the dish. NARRATOR: But you
knew that, didn't you? Of course, the cone
isn't the only way to eat ice cream with one hand. The ice cream bar was
invented in the 1920s when a young boy came into a
confectioner's shop in Iowa by the name of Christian Nelson. And the boy only
had a nickel, and he couldn't decide between buying
ice cream and buying chocolate. And he wanted to have both. And that got Christian Nelson
to thinking, how could I put these two things together
to satisfy this customer? And what he invented became
the Eskimo pie as we know it. NARRATOR: Today, the Eskimo
pie and its offshoot, the Eskimo pie crunch bar,
are born at the Dreyer's plant in Bakersfield. This is what we would
call a molded product. And the mold is essentially
just like you'd make an ice cube at home, where you put
water into an ice cube tray, only we do it in a
much larger scale. NARRATOR: That means
20,000 bars every hour. You spray the ice
cream inside the mold. Then on the bottom of that
we spray 55-degree-below-zero brine solution solution to
actually freeze out the product inside that mold. The bar then comes around
where it begins to firm up, and we put a stick inside it. NARRATOR: One more
revolution and the bars are dumped into a dip tank. That's where a chocolate and
puffed rice coating is applied to the crunch bar. Then it's off to be packaged
and distributed nationwide. But ice cream has
a soft side too, and that's an
industry unto itself. Have a nice day. Thank you very much. NARRATOR: Today,
ice cream franchises are as much a part of our
landscape as ice cream itself. Their roots can be
traced to the early days of another great American
institution, the automobile. As Americans began to use
automobiles to get around, it really transformed the
way we enjoyed ice cream. They started to drive to
roadside stands and get ice cream right from the stand. Typically they
served soft serve, and that really also changed
the face of ice cream. NARRATOR: Soft serve
has less butter fat and less added air
than hard ice cream. And because it's served at a
higher temperature, 18 degrees Fahrenheit compared to 5 or 10
degrees with hard ice cream, its flavors are more pronounced. Ice cream being colder,
you have less flavor release. It has a numbing effect on your
taste buds, where at 18 degrees there's more flavor
that comes through. NARRATOR: The ice cream
stands could pump out soft serve or frozen custard, a
derivative made with egg yolks, right on the premises. The invention of a revolutionary
freezer that could continuously dispense a semi-frozen
dessert made it all possible. While today's soft serve
freezers are far more advanced, they do share many
of the same features. In a typical
ice cream freezer, ice cream is added to the
freezing cylinder, it's frozen, it's drawn off, and then it's
frozen in the hardening room quiescently. In the case of the soft
serve ice cream freezer, ice cream is
available on demand. You get ice cream where
all of the freezing has been done only in the
agitated freezing cylinder. NARRATOR: The design of a key
part of the soft serve freezer, the dasher, is also unique. And you can see these
plastic pieces, which fit over the metal and lock in,
are going to be actually the scraping mechanism. They'll scrape the ice cream
off the walls of the freezer. You'll also notice this
helical design which is going to push the ice
cream forward so that it'll be ready to draw out
at any given time. So now the ice cream's ready. The soft serve is
a little warmer than the typical hard ice cream,
which makes it eat a little bit better. So it's soft and refreshing,
and it's ready all day long. NARRATOR: One of the first men
to see a future in soft serve was J.F. Grandpa McCullough,
who along with his son Alex created Dairy Queen, the
cone with a curl on top. In their ice cream plant
that they owned and operated, they dispensed ice
cream in a soft state out of their freezers
on a daily basis. They wanted to deliver that
same product to the consumers. So they connected with
a friend of theirs who had a walk-up stand, and they
did a test run one day. And in two hours they served
more than 1,600 servings of this ice cream. So they knew they
were onto something. NARRATOR: It didn't take
long for Dairy Queen to become part of
American culture. Dairy Queen tended to go
into towns that were smaller, and it became part
of the corner hangout where you walked up to
get your soft serve cone and talk to your neighbors,
and then walk back home. NARRATOR: Today, Galloway
Brothers of Neenah, Wisconsin is one of several plants that
produce the base mix for Dairy Queen. The ingredients
that go into the mix are almost the same as
those in hard ice cream, but the precise formula remains
a closely guarded secret. For Dairy Queen, they have
a formula that we must meet-- so much sugar, so much
butter fat, so much milk. NARRATOR: The milk is trucked
in daily from local dairies, stored in one of several silos,
and then piped into a blending tank. This is where we blend
all of the ingredients that go into Dairy Queen. The computer has a list of
ingredients such as sucrose, corn syrup, cream, condensed
skim milk, and milk. It blends them based on
weight with a Coriolis meter. The dry ingredients
are added up here. This basically is a
great, big Waring blender. We put the sucrose and
corn syrup in here, then add the dry ingredients,
such as stabilizers and flavoring. NARRATOR: After
the mix is blended, it's pumped into a ballast
tank, heated, pasteurized, homogenized, and then cooled. Behind me is the final
operation in the Dairy Queen manufacturing process. This is our packaging operation. Each machine can fill a 6-gallon
bag in about five seconds. That's enough to make about
4,000 cones in one minute. NARRATOR: Dairy Queen is the
world's largest soft serve franchise, with over 5,700
locations in North America alone. Have a nice day. Thank you very much. NARRATOR: But since
the 1970s the soft serve scene has become
a bit more crowded, thanks to frozen yogurt. Frozen yogurt
really started out as frozen yogurt, which was
a very acid, highly flavored product. And that didn't sell very well. The problem was is it
didn't taste so great. It was a little bitter, and it
wasn't as sweet as ice cream consumers were used to having. It wasn't until the early '80s
that a couple companies started playing around with the yogurt
levels and going for a lower acid profile that all of a
sudden it reached a great deal of consumer acceptance. And that's when TCBY
really started up in 1981. NARRATOR: And just how did
frozen yogurt makers like TCBY succeed? By making their product
taste less like yogurt and more like ice cream. It all begins with a mix
produced at Scott Brothers Dairy in Chino, California. What distinguishes
us, of course, is the fact that we add a
significant amount of yogurt. That yogurt is made in
these tanks right here. They're called
our culture tanks. We actually cultured
about 106 to 107 degrees Fahrenheit to help the cultures
grow a little bit faster. NARRATOR: It takes
seven and 1/2 hours to prepare the yogurt cultures. Flavors are added. Then it's all combined with
the base mix and packaged. The levels of live active
cultures in our yogurt are very high. 25 million per
gram is right where are those good yogurts
that are proclaiming live active cultures are. I think that's the
big surprise-- my god, that's real yogurt. In the past, there was rumors
that frozen yogurt really wasn't yogurt. For us, that's not the case. NARRATOR: Studies suggest that
live active cultures improve immunity and digestion. There are other health
benefits as well. Our yogurt is 50% less
calories and 80% less fat than a comparable
serving of ice cream. It's just like fresh yogurt,
but you get it in a way that you just love the taste. NARRATOR: In recent years,
several new establishments have come full circle
in frozen yogurt and are now selling a
tangy-tasting product. Among them, Pinkberry, which has
attracted an almost cult-like following in New
York and California. I'm here at least
four times a week, most of the time
more than once a day, so much so that
they know my name. [laughs] NARRATOR: Pinkberry calls
it frozen yogurt reinvented. It tastes so different than
like every other frozen yogurt or ice cream. It's ridiculous. It's like a perfect blend
of like sweet, and sour, and fruity, and crunchy
like all at the same time. NARRATOR: But whether
you're having frozen yogurt or good, old-fashioned
ice cream, the key is how much you eat. Have a good day. Ice cream is an excellent
source of protein. It's an excellent
source of calcium. It is an excellent
source of energy. The problem is if you consume
ice cream as a staple, then you're consuming
too many calories and too many calories from fat. NARRATOR: For many
ice cream lovers, calories are a necessary evil. These folks flip over the
high-end, highly dense premium ice creams. NARRATOR: There was a time when
there were only three flavors of ice cream. That figure has now ballooned
into the hundreds, if not thousands. But for sheer outrageousness,
nothing tops the flavorful creations of Ben and Jerry's. We make great, fun, funky,
chunky ice cream, lots of big chunks in it, swirls. We make the ice cream
impossible flavor possible. NARRATOR: Vermont's most
popular tourist attraction began in 1978 as a
tiny homemade ice cream parlor run by childhood friends
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. Interestingly enough, ice cream
wasn't their first choice. We originally
thought about bagels, checked out
bagel-making equipment, found out it was more
money than we had, and figured ice cream
had to be cheaper. NARRATOR: 30 years
later, Ben and Jerry's is a cultural institution. Ben and Jerry's ice cream
is made with all-natural ingredients. So we start right
here in Vermont with lots of fresh dairy that
we get here-- milk and cream, sugar, eggs. We're also going to be adding
in other great ingredients that we use as add-ins. NARRATOR: The
add-ins or inclusions can range from broken
pieces of popular candy bars to fruits and nuts of
every shape and size. You chew when you
eat your ice cream. That was one of the bases when
they made their ice cream. We're going to have
ice cream, we're going to chew it is what
Ben and Jerry started. NARRATOR: Chunky Monkey is one
of Ben and Jerry's most popular flavors. Like most factory-made ice
creams, it begins as a mix. Then come the add-ins, walnuts
and pieces of chocolate. So this is where we bring
Ben and Jerry's to life. This is what we know
as our chunk feeder, where we add fruit. We add chunks, nut, chips. We add serious chunks. NARRATOR: The
serious chunks first go into the hopper, a
bin that can hold up to 14 gallons of
ingredients, which next drop into the enrobing chamber. There, a star wheel determines
the amount of chunks to go into the ice cream mix by
rotating at different speeds. The ice cream then enters
the 4-foot-long blender tube, where an agitator made up
of several paddles rotates and evenly distributes
the chunks. From there, the
ice cream continues to the automatic filler. Every day, the plant turns
out about 320,000 pints. So this is the end of the line
before it hits the deep freeze. This is where no
one gets to see it, and it's a nice
soft serve creamy. This is good stuff. NARRATOR: You would think in
a company as wildly successful as Ben and Jerry's every
flavor would be a hit-- not so. We had a vanilla ice cream
with gummy worms in it, but the worms would freeze
solid so it was too much chew. We've tried hot chocolate, which
was a chocolate ice cream with jalapeño peppers in it. We've even tried some more
savory, less dessert kind of flavors, like sour
cream and onion ice cream-- not very popular. NARRATOR: What is popular, at
least among some brave souls, is the party in a bucket
known as the Vermonster. You can get it at
every one of Ben and Jerry's 650 scoop shops. The Vermonster is made up
with 20 scoops of ice cream. You get to choose the flavors. We've cut up four bananas
into each Vermonster. We'll scoop in a couple handfuls
of chocolate chip cookie pieces. We'll then scoop in
brownies all chunked up. You can get additional
toppings as per your choice. We always top off the Vermonster
with plenty of whipped cream. We also add in four
ladles of hot fudge. And there you have it. Great. NARRATOR: Just who are the
people who come up with all the Ben and Jerry flavors? Sometimes I feel
like a mad scientist. NARRATOR: Meet
Peter Lind, the man behind such flavors as Wavy
Gravy and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. It's more working from what
your taste buds are telling you. What works together well? What textures connect? NARRATOR: Today, he's working
on creating a pint-sized version of the Vermonster. It begins with plain
vanilla ice cream. Then Peter starts
working his magic. We need some chips, right? We got to have chips. We're going to have a
little cookie dough. We'll put that in there,
little cookie dough. How about-- how about brownies? Sure, all right, why not? I like brownies. And some chocolate chip cookies
for a different texture. And let's put some cherries in. I know. Cherries, wow, OK, kind of
sundae type of thing going on. Now I will mix these up. There we go. Nice, nice. Oh, I don't know. I think we need some M&M's. Yeah, think we need some M&Ms.
This is a Vermonster which does have M&M. All right, so
I'm going to pop it right into my pastry bag here. NARRATOR: All it needs
now is a little fudge. Then it's off to the freezer. 20 minutes later,
the moment of truth. Good crunch, good viscosity
on the fudge, good mushiness on the banana. Mm. I could do this. This is a good start
for a mini Vermonster. NARRATOR: You might think Ben
and Jerry's has pushed ice cream to its limits, but
some folks have taken things even further. Are these liquid
nitrogen-created balls the future of ice cream? ng] NARRATOR: Ice cream can
take the form of everything from a fudge-covered whale
to specialty desserts that defy description. But what does the future hold
for this ever-evolving treat? One company claims to
already have the answer. The same way that a microwave
oven reinvented the way that people cook their food,
we somewhat reinvented the way that people think of ice cream. NARRATOR: This is Dippin' Dots,
the self-proclaimed ice cream of the future. Here in this nondescript
Paducah, Kentucky plant, folks are churning
out a unique product-- unique because of its beaded
shape, but also because it's been frozen cryogenically
using liquid nitrogen. The process was the brainchild
of microbiologist Curt Jones. I had been working
on a project at work where we were freezing
yogurt cultures. And I had developed a way to do
it using liquid nitrogen, which is 320 below zero. It just made me think, I wonder
if I could freeze ice cream in the same way and
how it would react. NARRATOR: Curt soon
had his answer, and the result is Dippin' Dots. It all begins with a
standard pasteurized mix that is flavored with one
of Dippin' Dots 30 flavors. That's when the fun begins. Once we've completed
the flavoring process, the product is then transferred
to what you see behind me, a cryogenic processor. In the top of the
processor there's an instrument that allows
a measured amount of mix to come into contact
with liquid nitrogen, and then it freezes instantly. NARRATOR: That instrument at the
top of the processor functions like an eyedropper, releasing
the mix in tiny droplets. When the droplets hit
the liquid nitrogen, they're flash frozen into
beads that descend like BBs, and inclined agar releases a
gallon of beads into each bag. Due to this radical
freezing technique, the beads contain only the
tiniest ice crystals and almost no air. They're also a lot colder
than regular ice cream, coming in at minus 20 degrees. Scientifically speaking, it
gives it a very, very creamy, smooth taste, even though it's
a real fun and novel product. NARRATOR: The beads are
immediately packed into bags to be shipped worldwide. To maintain their
creaminess, they're stored in the subarctic
minus 50 degree freezer. At times we like to tell
everybody it's the largest, coldest freezer in America,
because at that temperature it stores more product than any
product like that in the US. NARRATOR: In 2007
alone, Dippin' Dots sold more than 2 million
gallons of the chilly beads. You'd have to have brain freeze
to scoff at those numbers. The future also looks bright for
another innovative ice cream, slow churned, first
developed at Dreyer's. And we spent $20
million, 15 years in developing what is called
slow churned, which is not added ingredients. It's a process. And this process takes
the temperature down, and we freeze it much colder. And by doing so you
have a real fine texture that gives a creaminess
with great appearance and great flavor. NARRATOR: Compared
to regular ice cream, slow churn is only half the
fat and 30% fewer calories. And essentially what we do
is we create the perception in your mouth that the
same amount of butter fat is there by taking
that butter fat and spreading it out to
create a higher surface area relative to the
volume of butter fat. And that then tricks
your mouth into thinking, I ate a whole lot of butter fat. NARRATOR: In recent
years, nearly every ice cream manufacturer has come
out with a slow churned type of low-fat alternative. The future of ice
cream is bright. We grew up with
America and ice cream, and it's become the number
one dessert in America. But there's still some star
flavors yet to be created.
