Space Camp Alum Reports on Astronaut Ice Cream in Honor of the Anniversary of the Moon Landing

Bethany's husband Kevin joins us today with this guest post about "astronaut ice cream" in honor of this very special space exploration occasion. Happy 40th Anniversary, First Moon Landing!

In honor of the anniversary of the moon landing, I eagerly volunteered to write about freeze-dried ice cream. The ice cream I bought was labeled "Astronaut Ice Cream", but that is likely more of a brand than a description. It's clear that astronauts opted for the real stuff as soon as it was possible.

[Full disclosure: I did attend Space Camp in 1988, which might make me more qualified for this post than an actual astronaut.]

I think ice cream is all about ratios: water, air, fat, sugar, binders, and flavors. If you're some sort of food wizard, you could play with the ratios and decrease the amount of any ingredient with a pretty good outcome. There are fat free, sugar free, and dairy free ice creams, but to me that ruins the fun. To me the magic in ice cream is in the high ratio of milk fat to low price, and everything else is along for the ride. However, what happens when science enters the novelty dessert business and blow away the ingredient that none of us cared about anyway?

No ice cream review should include the words lyophilization or sublimation, so let's delve right into the ice cream itself. Let's start with a chart of what happens when you leave ice cream at room temperature:

That's right, it's all in the shelf life. The scale for time is in logarithmic weeks, so while your bowl of ice cream, and the people who made it, have long since passed on, the freeze-dried ice cream enthusiast still has an option.

To the science purists reading here:

• The units on tastiness is not labeled, but it is indeed scaled in International Kevin Tastiness Units, or IKTU.
• If you do the math on the x axis, this chart goes to ~1.9 trillion years. You will likely have to repackage your ice cream at least a few times during this period.

Enjoying freeze-dried ice cream is a bit different of a process. Since it isn't wet, you just grab it with your fingers and shovel. It's firm, but crumbles easily and tastes good. It still has the magic ratio of fats and sugars after all, but it doesn't necessarily taste like ice cream. Strawberry kind of tastes like strawberry, but it mostly just tastes like freeze-dried ice cream. Though, I can vouch that if you cram enough of it in your mouth at one time, the ice cream somewhat reconstitutes, just without the risk of brain freeze.

In short, this is good stuff. You should make a beeline to your nearest science museum and buy some, I know I will. Just don't spend too much time picking it out, I promise you it's still good and the ice cream sandwich is basically the same thing as the neopolitan.

Guess I am eating alone tonight, since it seems like Kevin is off at the Boston Museum of Science buying "astronaut" ice cream. Thanks for the post, Kev!

[Scoopalicious is celebrating National Ice Cream month with a Post-A-Day throughout the month of July!]

Guest Post: Wai Wai, Chinatown, Boston

Bethany's husband takes us to Chinatown in Boston for his favorite ice cream...

I was in Boston's Chinatown last night and realized that one of my all time favorite ice cream places EVER was one block over. The sign had changed since I last visited about a decade ago, but it's still there. Wai Wai on Oxford St:


It's below street level and the first thing you see is roasted duck, but don't let that fool you. To the left of the duck is a small ice cream case and the only flavor I've ever tried is Coconut. I never want to risk any other flavor just because the Coconut is so singularly awesome.

Bethany would use fancier words to describe this, but it super soft, very coconutty, and I noticed a few small ice chunks in it. Whatever is in this ice cream, they should keep doing it, and I'll keep stepping in whenever I can.

[Scoopalicious is celebrating National Ice Cream month with a Post-A-Day throughout the month of July!]

Guest Blog: Beijing Black Sesame

What is the ice cream experience like abroad? We have Japanese Ice Cream and Ice Cream Ireland to tell us something about it, but it's always nice when our traveling friends taste ice cream in different countries and tell of their experiences. Husband was in China last week on business, and he graciously bought ice cream at the Beijing Airport and wrote us a guest posting. If you have international ice cream stories to tell, please do tell -- we'd love to share your story.

I was walking through Beijing International Terminal 2, debating if I had bought enough souvenirs for my awesome, sexy wife when I noticed this:

I didn't have much room in my luggage, but I did have room in my stomach, so I figured I could try bringing back an ice cream post from China. Plus, if I load it up with enough compliments about Bethany and her incredibly smart and talented partner, Tina, they'd post anything.

First off China does a few things right and service is one of them. In the USA, this little stand would have been staffed by one unhappy teenager trying to avoid looking at you. Customers = work, right? This stand had two enthusiastic women scanning the crowds. The guys at the right were just standing around looking at some lights on the wall, my guess is that they were monitoring the delicate ice cream computers. At this point, I've wandered a bit closer so that both women are smiling, waving, and trying to offer me samples. I start scannng the case and they hand me a tasting spoon of coffee ice cream, easily one of my favorite flavors ever that I didn't even see in the case yet. How did they do that? There must be an ancient Chinese art of flavor identification.



The coffee was pretty good, but I could get that anywhere. I kept looking in the case and something else caught my eye in the back corner. Black sesame. Now if any of you know my dazzling wife, you'll know the only type of sesame she ever liked was the street, and even then she would have reminded you how much she doesn't like the seeds. Bethany wasn't here, so I bought the smallest size of black sesame for 25 RMB, thanked them in my nonexistent Chinese and walked away.

Ok, now take some time to look at this picture very closely and you'll see something very unfortunate:



Got it?
That's right.
Seat 44L, which is soon to be one crappy seat in the back corner on a 14-hour flight to Newark.

The ice cream. Now I am notoriously bad at identifying Bethany's archnemesis of seeds, which is probably why I had no idea what this tasted like. It had a great texture, but then this other flavor kicked in and stayed. I think the best part was the blue-grey color, which I hadn't seen since I tried squid ink ice cream with a friend in Hokkaido. That had decidedly more color than taste. This has decidely more taste than color, and I also wasn't too happy with where this taste wanted me to go. It was like my poor little taste buds had just gotten into some sketchy van.

Anyway, the taste let up when I finished the cup, which was good news since it was going to be a while before I'd get on the plane and the food cart would make it all the way back to 44L. The ladies probably knew me better than I did; next time I'll stick with the coffee. All of the other flavors in the case had been pretty common, with some green tea ice cream thrown in to round out the Asian experience. The next time I'm in this terminal I think I'll get one of those other flavors, unless they come up with another color that looks like it shouldn't be ice cream.

Disclaimer: Despite the lovely things said about both Tina and me, we had nothing to do with the content of this posting and, though accurate, we did not edit this piece to make ourselves look better!