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Eating ice cream is a summer ritual. But some people love ice cream so much that they eat it all year round. So what makes ice cream so delicious and irresistible? Find this out in the Penn State ‘Ice Cream College,” otherwise known as the Ice Cream Short course.
Here, you can learn all the ins-and-outs of producing ice cream in the course that is offered for one week every year in January, reported CNN. But it is not for everyone.
“Our target audience is people who are serious about ice cream,” Dr. Bob Roberts, Ph.D., the head of the food science department at Penn State, told CNN.
This is the place where ice cream people, like manufacturers, go to learn about ice cream. Every year, employees from Turkey Hill, Haagen-Dazs, Friendly’s, Baskin Robbins, Nestle, and other ice cream giants take the course.
The science of ice cream
The course at Penn State is the oldest and largest one that deals with the science of ice cream, according to the university’s website. It actually began in 1892 as part of a course about dairy manufacturing and was held in January when farmwork was less pressing.
In 1925, after ice cream became popular, a separate course that was devoted to making ice cream was established. Every year, 120 students from around the globe attend the program and there are 4,400 graduates to date.
Certificates are awarded after the course which attracts students from all sectors of ice cream manufacturing from research and development to quality control to companies that provide goods and services to the industry.
About the course
The short course packs a lot of information into just a week. Students attend more than 20 workshops about all aspects of ice cream production that include flavors, freezing, and even the manufacturing of novelty frozen desserts. Penn State’s The Berkey Creamery is used as a lab for research.
Making ice cream is actually very complicated and involves understanding what’s happening at a molecular level, reported CNN. You have to understand how milk proteins interact with fat and what happens if ingredients are changed.
Ross Cohen, the CEO and co-owner of Sweet Cow, a Colorado ice cream company, told CNN, “The most important thing I learned was better understanding our ice cream mix – that’s the milk, cream and sugar and all the goodness that is the base of every ice cream we make – better understanding how the ingredients interact with each other.”
To understand how this works, there are classes on milk composition, food microbiology, dairy production, and even ice cream physics so the students will understand everything about making good ice cream.
“Everything is easy when things work,” Roberts told CNN. “When things don’t work … you need to understand the science. You need to understand the chemistry. You need to understand the engineering.”
The course is so popular that when registration opens it is full in days or sometimes hours. One year, there was so much demand that the registration crashed.
One thing is sure, as temperature’s soar, ice cream’s popularity will continue to grow and the Ice Cream College will continue to teach new generations the science of making this delicious treat.
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