Class offers scoop on ice cream

While many faculty, staff and students are on Spring Break this week, others from across North America have come to get the inside scoop on how to make ice cream.

The College of Agricultural and Life Sciences and Cooperative Extension Services is running a four-day course through Thursday, March 28, designed to provide in-depth exposure to the practice of successfully manufacturing quality frozen desserts using batch freezers. The course will consist of lectures as well as hands-on experiences with batch freezer operation.

Assistant Professor Scott Rankin in the Food Science Department initiated this course after teaching it for three years at the University of Maryland.

“There is a strong heritage in frozen desserts here,” Rankin says. “UW has more programs in dairy processing then almost any other university. This program compliments that.”

The class and will cover fundamental concerns of quality evaluation, flavor selections and processing procedures as well as the actual manufacture and evaluation of dozens of different products in all flavors.

Rankin says many people participate in this program because they are thinking of a career change.

“The ice cream industry is very romanticized, he says.” “Most people come to this program very naive but leave knowing that it is a lot of work. I think of it as a reality therapy program.”

The course produces approximately 100 batches of ice cream over the four-day session ranging from vanillas and chocolates to coffee to fruit flavors including strawberry, peach, mango and pear. The products are donated to local food banks after they have been evaluated and deemed safe to eat.

The end results are usually very good and sometimes a little experimental, Rankin says.

“It’s hard to make bad ice cream, but it’s also hard to make really great ice cream,” he says. “But it is always something to shoot for.”