It's official; the world's fastest ice cream maker is polymer physicist Peter Barham from the University of Bristol, UK.
Katharine Sanderson/Bray, UK
It’s official; the world’s fastest ice cream maker is polymer physicist Peter Barham from the University of Bristol, UK.
Barham smashed his own world record by shaving two seconds off the time it took him to make a litre of ice cream. The new world record, as verified by Guinness World Records, is 18.78 seconds, though Barham says he can go faster. He once made ice cream in nine seconds, he told Chemistry World.
His method involves mixing cream (with a hint of vanilla) and icing sugar with liquid nitrogen. This removes the heat from the ingredients and results in a perfectly edible ice cream.
The record attempt was made at the launch of Kitchen Chemistry, a book for schools compiled by the RSC’s Ted Lister and chef Heston Blumenthal, whose triple Michelin star winning restaurant the Fat Duck was recently voted best in the world by Restaurant magazine.
Barham has been Blumenthal’s science guru for many years and has helped the chef to understand his food and to sate his appetite for science. ’This has been 20 years of relentless questions,’ admitted Blumenthal.
Barham has done calculations using a simple mixing model to work out a crude estimate of the fastest theoretical time for making ice cream - 4.2 seconds. But he won’t be spending much time practicing for his next record attempt. ’What is there to practice?’ he said, ’it’s just stir, stir, done.’
No comments yet