It’s hard to imagine life without ice cream. That’s probably why the folks at NASA developed freeze-dried astronaut ice cream. Believe it or not, the freeze-dried version starts out as real ice cream. The process is a little technical, so we’ll let the description below from Wikipedia.com cover it:

“The ice cream is placed in a vacuum chamber and frozen until the water crystallizes. The air pressure is lowered, creating a vacuum, forcing air out of the chamber; next heat is applied, vaporizing the ice; finally a freezing coil traps the vaporized water. This process continues for hours, resulting in a perfect freeze-dried ice cream slice.”

Yeah, after a long, hard day of collecting moon rocks or repairing space stations, there’s nothing better than a nice brick of freeze-dried ice cream. Well, nothing better except for maybe the real thing.

Astronaut ice cream (the standard Neapolitan flavor) was first consumed by Neil Armstrong on the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969. Freeze-dried ice cream is supposedly still used by astronauts today and also by U.S. troops while in the field.

Here’s a fun link to a short story about the history of food in space. According to this account, real vanilla ice cream was stocked in a freezer in the Skylab spacecraft from the 1970s. If you want a taste the space life for yourself, here’s a link where you can buy some.

As a kid did you ever taste the cocoa in the tin, thinking it would taste like chocolate? Were you surprised on how bitter it tasted? The most basic chocolate is made with sugar, milk, and cocoa.

Dutching is a special process used by ice cream or chocolate manufacturers to remove the bitter, acidic taste found in natural cocoa. During dutching, the cocoa bean or cocoa powder is treated with alkaline salts to give the chocolate a darker color and a smoother, milder flavor. This allows us to use more cocoa for a rich intense chocolate flavor, without it tasting bitter or harsh. The process was invented in Holland by chemist Coenraad Van Houten. He, of course, was of Dutch descent which explains the name of the process he created.

Every now and then something entirely new comes along in the world of ice cream and we’re happy to share with you that Turkey Hill has developed one of those “entirely new” products.

It’s called Duetto, and technically it’s not even an ice cream (at least not in the traditional sense). To be more specific, Duetto is a combination of vanilla soft serve and swirls of smooth, scoopable Venice ice. It is in select stores now (and more stores later on) and available in mango, raspberry, lemon, and cherry flavors.

So what makes Duetto something entirely new? Well, until now no major ice cream manufacturer has been able to package a soft-serve easy-scoop ice cream and smooth, scoopable water ice product like ours. That’s because Turkey Hill has found a method and recipe to keep the composition of both treats scoopable and soft at normal freezer temperatures.

Although some of the details of the Duetto recipe and manufacturing process are a secret, we can tell you that it has taken us more than a year of trial and error to perfect the recipe we’re using today. That’s a lot of tasting and scientific “analysis” by our research & development team, but we know you’ll be pleased with the results.

In fact, we’re so proud of our new product, we’ve painted one of our Giant Cows to resemble Cherry Duetto’s signature red and white swirl. That cow was featured at the 91st Annual PA Farm Show earlier this month and our team gave away 23,000 samples of Duetto on the opening weekend ALONE. We’ll take that as a good sign of things to come!

Richard S. from Joppa, Maryland writes:

Dear Ernie,

Why is it that some ice cream containing fruit contains more fruit than other containers of the same brand and flavor? Like my Turkey Hill Cherry Orchard Limited Edition. My sister's product had gobs of cherries and mine had hardly any. What's up with that, Ern?

Sorry about the lack of cherries, Richard. Here's what may have happened.

Fruits, nuts, candies, cookies and all of what I call the “good stuff” is added to the soft frozen, flavored ice cream through an ingredient feeder. The good stuff is added to a hopper where it delicately slides down into a turning auger carrying it to a spinning star wheel where it is deposited into the ice cream. The combination of ice cream and good stuff is then blended as it is added to the awaiting container. For product safety this is a closed system. Occasionally bridging occurs at the entrance to the auger, causing a shortage of good stuff in the ice cream. This, I suspect, is what happened to your disappearing cherries.

This process is monitored and recorded. As an additional safeguard, members of our Research & Development Team and Quality Assurance Team do ice cream cutting each and every day. They pull containers from the beginning and end of each batch to be tested for things like taste and texture. Then, they cut each container in half with a big knife to make sure all of the inclusions and ripples are dispersed properly.

Thanks for your question!

Ernie

They say our preferences for just about anything –- from cars to houses to dog breeds -– can reveal a little (or a lot) about who we are as people. Apparently even your favorite flavor of ice cream can indicate whether you’re shy or outgoing, a leader or a follower.

We’ve managed to track down a few of these online tests and present them here for you to try for yourself. Most of the tests ask you to choose your favorite flavor and then tell you what that preference reveals about your personality. Seems simple enough. This test is one of our favorites.

This one works backwards by asking a series of questions and then revealing what flavor you are based on your responses.

And this quiz takes the process one step further by telling you which flavors you are most romantically compatible with. From the looks of it, strawberry lovers have very few enemies!

Believe it or not, our 75th Anniversary Sweepstakes is drawing to a close. January 31 is the last day, so if you’ve got any “specially-marked packages” of Turkey Hill Ice Cream, now’s the time to register them on the sweepstakes page.

Most of you already know that the centerpiece of the sweepstakes is the 75 Lancaster County prizes, and while all of our prizes are useful, some are a little…unusual.

Ina Adamashvilli from Staten Island, New York knows what we’re talking about. She and her family were the recent winners of seven-and-a-half tons of horse manure. (Hey, if you’re a gardener, Lancaster County manure can’t be beat!) Luckily, Ina was given the option of taking the cash equivalent which, at $9 a ton, comes to $67.50. The Staten Island Advance newspaper and the New York Daily News wrote about Ina’s smelly prize.

On the right is a picture of the family. This same photo (taken by photographer Jan Somma-Hammel) appeared in the Staten Island Advance article.

According to the Daily News, “Mrs. Adamashvili had never heard of Turkey Hill before moving to Staten Island from Russia last year, but she started buying two cartons of Turkey Hill Ice Cream every week to satisfy her family’s sweet tooth.”

The article also noted that the family had never won anything in Russia, but now that they’ve arrived in America, their luck has changed. “The first time we (won a) green card,” said Ina referring to the residency cards issued to the family not long ago, “The second time we (won) this prize.”

When asked what she was going to do with her $67.50, Ina replied, “I’m going to buy more ice cream.”

As many of you know, Turkey Hill Dairy is dedicated to preserving local farms and the farming culture, so it should come as no surprise that the Turkey Hill team will be at the Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania this week.

The first clue to our presence is our Giant Swirly Cow sitting outside the Farm Show Complex’s main Cameron Street entrance. That’s her below, dwarfing the regular-sized cows that graze the lawn outside the complex. And just inside the Maclay Street entrance, you’ll find the Turkey Hill booth, where we’ll be giving out free samples of some of our new products from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m., Monday through Friday. If you’re planning to visit the Farm Show this week, feel free to stop by and say hello.

It’s hard to believe over 400,000 people visit the Farm Show—or not so hard to believe according to some members of our weekend team. But don’t let the crowds discourage you from visiting. The food alone is worth the trip (not to mention the 800-pound butter sculpture of Benjamin Franklin).

Hope everyone is having a Happy New Year so far. For December, we chose several blog comments at random and are giving each of the authors a free Turkey Hill ice cream spade. The winners are:

- Brian G. from Port Jefferson Station, New York

- Kathleen S. from Salley, South Carolina

- Cathy L. from Cherry Hill, New Jersey

- Marvin M. from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania

- Carol A. from Jamestown, Rhode Island

- Joan O. from Whitman, Massachusetts

- Gisele P. from Chebeague Island, Maine

It’s nice to see that our readers come from so many different states! Congrats and thanks to everyone for reading and commenting. There are a few winners not listed here who still haven't responded to the e-mail we sent asking for their name and address. If you get that e-mail, let us know so we can send you your spade. (Who doesn't want free ice cream supplies?) Also, if there's anything anyone would like us to talk about on the Ice Cream Journal, just let us know by leaving a comment or two!

Just wanted to give you all a heads up about another great ice cream blog worth reading (they're rare, but they do exist). It's called Ice Cream Ireland, and it's written by a man named Kieran Murphy who runs two ice cream shops in Ireland.

According to Kieran, his blog is “all about making, eating, pondering about and enjoying sweet things by an Irish ice cream man and chocoholic”. Sounds good to us! We like it because in addition to talking about ice cream, it also includes lots of great recipes and stories about life in the small town of Dingle, Ireland.

Read all about it here: www.icecreamireland.com.