Icecream Journal

Happy Independence Day! We hope everyone finds a safe and fun way to celebrate this July 4th. We suggest a cookout with friends and family members. As for dessert, you’re on your own (but we can think of a few ideas). Speaking of patriotic things, here’s an entry about “astronaut ice cream” that originally ran back in January.  

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.

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