Creamy, Healthier Ice Cream? What’s the Catch?
By JULIA MOSKIN
Published: July 26, 2006
IN its quest to create ice cream as voluptuous as butter and as virtuous as broccoli, the ice cream industry has probed the depths of the Arctic Ocean, studied the intimate structures of algae and foisted numerous failures on the American public.
“I have tried them all as they came down the pike: dairy-free, fat-free, sugar-free; with tofu, yogurt, rice, whatever,” said Linda Calhoun, a teacher who lives near Flagstaff, Ariz., cataloguing the disappointments she has tasted over the years. “They always make me sad.”
For Americans who spend each summer wrestling with temptation, there is fresh hope in the freezer case. New industrial processes, including one that involves a protein cloned from the blood of an Arctic Ocean fish, have allowed manufacturers to produce very creamy, dense, reduced-fat ice creams with fewer additives. The new products appeal to those who have acquired a taste for superpremium high-fat ice cream but cannot stomach its fat content.
Edy’s (branded as Dreyer’s west of the Rockies) has tripled sales in its reduced-fat line since replacing its Grand Light with Slow Churned in 2004. Breyers introduced Double Churned flavors last year and has nearly doubled its product line. More than just marketing-speak, slow-churned and double-churned each refers to a process called low-temperature extrusion, which significantly reduces the size of the fat globules and ice crystals in ice cream.
Banking on the creamy mouth-feel of these new formulations, even Häagen-Dazs launched a line of Light ice creams last year to complement its butterfat-rich line. “We waited years and years for this technology,” said Gulbin Hoeberechts, a marketing manager for the company. “Before, our only choices would have been adding air, water or ingredients that don’t belong in ice cream.”
Almost all commercial ice creams contain industrial ingredients that mimic the luxurious effects of butterfat and egg yolks: some are natural, like carrageenan, extracted from algae plentiful in the Irish Sea; others are synthetic, like mono- and diglycerides.
But using new technologies can be risky for manufacturers. The other new method for making supercreamy ice cream was caught up last month in the global debate over genetically modified foods. In June, Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate, applied to Britain’s Food Standards Agency for permission to use a new ingredient in its frozen desserts — a protein cloned from the blood of an eel-like Arctic Ocean fish, the ocean pout.
Instead of extracting the protein from the fish, which Unilever describes as “not sustainable or economically feasible” in its application, the company developed a process for making it, by altering the genetic structure of a strain of baker’s yeast so that it produces the protein during fermentation.
This ingredient, called an ice-structuring protein, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and is used by Unilever to make some products in the United States, like some Popsicles and a new line of Breyers Light Double Churned ice cream bars.
“Ice-structuring proteins protect the fish, which would otherwise die in freezing temperatures,” said H. Douglas Goff, professor of dairy sciences at the University of Guelph in Ontario. “They also make ice cream creamier, by preventing ice crystals from growing.”
In Britain, where Unilever’s Cornetto cone is as iconic as the Fudgsicle is in the United States, the news media have leapt in with headlines about “vaneela” ice cream. Britain, like the rest of the European Union, requires labeling for any food that has contact with genetically altered material, even if that substance is not present in the finished product. In its application Unilever stressed that no DNA or other “material from fish” is used in the process. But genetically modified foods have yet to gain wide acceptance from the European public, and Unilever has found itself the unwilling center of attention.
“It’s unfortunate that this happened to come out during our so-called summer when people are interested in ice cream,” said Trevor Gorin, head of media relations for Unilever in the United Kingdom. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain that no, the Cornetto will not taste fishy.”
The United States has no regulations requiring the labeling of genetically modified food, which has become increasingly common at every point in the food chain. Until recently, its practical applications were mostly in developing strains of crops, like soybeans and corn, that are more resistant to stresses like disease, weather and insects.
But research by people like Professor Goff is beginning to bear fruit for the processed-food industry: proteins like the ones found in the ocean pout are an example.
For consumers, the benefit is that ice-structuring proteins and low-temperature extrusion have raised the “creaminess” bar for the ice cream industry.
“The ice creams produced with the new methods are simply better than any ice creams have ever been,” Professor Goff said. “Quite definitely better in texture, and much better tasting.”
nytimes.com |
