N2 - Extreme Gelato

[khiemtran]

Long-time readers may remember the sign below, which I saw in the city back in July.



Well, it turns out what was coming was a liquid nitrogen icecream bar...



Welcome to N2 Extreme Gelato...



All the ice-creams, gelati and sorbets here are made fresh to order, with a splash of liquid nitrogen and plenty of panache.



For each of the products, a fluid mix is added to the mixer, then liquid nitrogen is added from a jug. Result: ice cream! (And a lot of white fumes...)



Conical flasks in the fridge.



And here's the cylinder of liquid nitrogen.



Past and present flavours on the wall. They had some quite interesting choices, including fish flavoured ice cream.



And the end result. Nitrogen icecream has an extra fine texture and lacks ice crystals, giving it a thick, smooth taste.



A happy customer.



An outside shot. Although the risks of frostbite from liquid nitrogen can easily be imagined, the real danger is asphyxiation. All that liquid magically fuming away is creating much larger volumes of odourless, colourless gas which can displace the oxygen in an enclosed space. Luckily this shop has an open wall, but I hope they've ensured they've got adequate ventilation near the back.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Wow! So cool! Now I want to get some liquid nitrogen and try making ice cream with it! I bet it's much faster than the old rock-salt-and-ice cooling method!

... and I wish places wouldn't say "very boring" about vanilla. Vanilla is a delicious flavor. Sometimes I add a dash of vanilla extract to vanilla ice cream to make it that much more vanilla.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

I wanted to try the fish flavour, but I thought Liem might appreciate the plain old chocolate and hazelnut (I guess they're trying to cajole people into being more adventurous...). But... Cigar-smoked Hainanese coffee! That would be worth a try. Well, except maybe for the cigar bit...

I notice they also had "Kinky Vanilla" at one point. I wonder what they did to Boring Vanilla apart from changing the label....

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I am betting "Kinky Vanilla" has a bit of the taste of leather and iron or something :-P

And yeah! The cigar-smoked Hainanese coffee flavor intrigued me, too! I actually kind of like the notion of smoking coffee with cigars--kind of like smoking pork with applewood, or something like that. Hmmm, applewood-smoked pork flavored ice cream, anyone?

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Also eww: cough syrup flavor?!

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Ah, but there's a trick there! Liem LOVES cough syrup (and indeed all medicine). There's a whole raft of sayings ("take your medicine", "a spoonful of sugar", etc) that don't seem to make sense anymore, ever since they worked out how to make kids medicine taste nice.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

It is true that in my childhood there was one cough medicine whose flavor I liked, so I guesssss I can believe it. But most of them were hideous variations on the theme of artificial cherry or grape....

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

Eek! Having recently come across an incident in the UK news of an unfortunate teenager who had to have her stomach removed after she drank a cocktail with liquid nitrogen in it, I'm not convinced of the sanity of this enterprise!!

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Yes, we heard about that here too. But that was something of a special case; you're not supposedly to actually consume the liquid nitrogen. (It's a bit like the difference between cooking foods in high temperature oil and actually trying to feed the hot oil to somebody.)

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

And when you put it in those terms, you suddenly realise just how stupid it was to actually ingest the stuff...