Freeze-dried ice cream is ice cream that has had most of the water removed from it by a freeze-drying process, sealed in a pouch, and requires no refrigeration.
It is also known as astronaut ice cream or space ice cream, typically a slab of ready-to-eat dehydrated ice cream. Compared to regular ice cream, it can be kept at room temperature without melting and is more brittle and rigid but still soft when bitten into. It was developed by Whirlpool Corporation under contract to NASA for the Apollo missions. Freeze-dried foods were developed so that foods could be sent on long-duration spaceflights, as to the Moon, and to reduce the weight of the water and oxygen normally found in food.
Freeze drying (or lyophilization) removes water from the ice cream by lowering the air pressure to a point where ice sublimes from a solid to a gas. The ice cream is placed in a vacuum chamber and frozen until the water crystallizes. The air pressure is lowered, creating a partial vacuum, forcing air out of the chamber; next heat is applied, sublimating the ice; finally a freezing coil traps the vaporized water. This process continues for hours, resulting in a freeze-dried ice cream slice.
Freeze-dried ice cream is sold by mail order and is common in science museums and NASA visitor center gift shops, sometimes accompanied by other freeze-dried foods.
Read more about Freeze-dried Ice Cream: Space Use, Traditional Ice Cream in Space
Famous quotes containing the words ice cream, ice and/or cream:
“How’d you like some ice cream, Doc?”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When you’re alone in the middle of the night and you wake in a sweat and a hell of a fright
When you’re alone in the middle of the bed and you wake like someone hit you in the head
You’ve had a cream of a nightmare dream and you’ve got the hoo-ha’s coming to you.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)