Welcome to brain stuff from how Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren Bogelbaum here admit it. Even the most open minded among us have preconceived notions about ice cream by virtue of the fact that it's basically flavored sweetened milk that's frozen. Certain properties are necessarily associated with it. For instance, it melts when you're eating it on a hot day. It's also very difficult to light on fire. But the days
of such predictable, old fashioned frozen treats are over. A team of Japanese scientists has developed a soft serve ice cream that won't turn to milk soup even after hours in the heat. And it's not because it contains the usual thickening suspects like diglycerides, kara gene in or polysorbate eighty. It's basically just regular ice cream with one small modification. The story of how we got to flammable ice cream is pretty good. It starts with a strawberry accident. After
the earthquake and tsunami ravage Japan. It's the one that caused the meltdown of the reactors at the Hookushima Nuclear Power Plant. A Japanese chef was tasked with figuring out what to do with strawberry polyphenol, a compound extracted from strawberries. It all started when nobody was buying a whole bunch of deformed strawberries grown in an area affected by the
earthquake because they just weren't shaped quite right. Researchers at Japan's Biotherapy Development Research Center wondered if instead of wasting all that fruit, something could be done with the polyphenol inside of it. They asked a pastry chef to create a dessert with it. The experiment went okay, but the problem was every time he added the compound to cream,
it hardened right up. Baha lightbulb inventor Tolmi, a professor emeritus of pharmacy at Kanazawa University, told Japanese newspaper The Asaki Shimbun polyphenol liquid has properties to make it difficult for water and oil to separate, so that a popsicle containing it will be able to retain the original shape of the cream for a longer time than usual and be hard to melt. With this realization, Odah and his research team developed Kanazawa Ice popsicles, which hit stores in
Japan last summer. They hold their shape through all sorts of treatment that traditional popsicles can't withstand, from hot sun to hair dryers. Now, Kanazawa Ice offers soft serve ice cream, which can reportedly be caught on fire without melting and can keep its shape at temperatures of a hundred four degrees fahrenheit, which is forty degrees celsius. I want to get your paws on some flammable ice cream, Well, you're just gonna have to travel to Japan if you're not
already there. Japan has no plans to export it just yet. Today's episode was written by Jesselyn Shields and produced by Tristan McNeil. For more on this and lots of other cool topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com