Wednesday Wisdom: Soft Serve vs. Hard Ice Cream
Have you ever wondered - what's really the difference between soft serve ice cream and hard ice cream?! Well we can tell you! It all comes down to the science.
Ice cream is made up of milk fats and air which depend on ingredients of an ice cream base and the recipe. Four All Ice Cream is a licensed dairy facility, which means that we can make our own ice cream bases from scratch. Other ice cream makers buy pre-made mixes that make it harder to come up with unique flavours, textures and quality. The most important benefit for making our ice cream from scratch is being able to make it with local milk. We use Eby Manor's 4.8% milk to make our ice creams.
Our soft serve recipe is made up of 6% milk fat, so that means it is almost entirely made from the 4.8% Eby Manor milk! This amount of milk fat is what makes soft serve a little less rich and more refreshing. Hard ice cream on the other hand is made up of 14% milk fat which means that we combine Eby Manor milk with cream to increase the milk fat content. Our future goal (a new years resolution, if you will) is to reformulate or use Eby Manor's new 10% cream in order to make our ice creams entirely from Eby Manor! A little side fact - Eby Manor has Golden Guernsey cows, which naturally produce milk with higher milk fats that are nutritionally rich... perfect for ice cream.
Another difference between soft serve and hard ice cream is that soft serve is essentially fresh ice cream right from ice cream machine. Our hard ice creams go from the ice cream machine into our hardening freezer at -30 degrees for at least 12 hours. This means that the two treats are also enjoyed at different temperatures: soft ice cream is typically warmer at about -6 degrees while hard ice cream is around -12 degrees when you eat it.
At our NEW LOCATION in Uptown Waterloo, we will be serving BOTH soft serve and hard ice cream!! Our soft serve machine will have two flavours plus a twist option. We plan to always have at least one vegan soft serve available at all times.
We hope you enjoyed this lesson in ice cream science for Wednesday Wisdom! See you next week!
