Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff. I'm more in vogel Bomb and today's episode is a classic from our archives. I was thinking about this one after we had a particularly warm weekend here in Atlanta. A team of researchers and chefs in Japan developed an ice cream that doesn't melt. Here's how it works,
Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vogel Bomb. 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 polyscorbit 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 invent to, a professor emeritus of pharmacy at
Kanazawa University, told Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun. Polypheno 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 hits 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 and four degrees fahrenheit, which is forty degrees celsius. I want to get your paws on some flammable ice cream, Well, you're just going to 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 Jesslin Shields and produced by Tristan McNeil and Eiler Klaang. For more on this lots of other topics, visit how stuffworks dot com. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio. Or more podcasts my heart Radio visit the i heart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.