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For water to freeze, it should first be super-chilled — that’s, chilled under 32 levels Fahrenheit. Only then does it endure a section change from liquid to stable: Its construction transforms from a loosely certain mass of flowing molecules into crystalline aggregates with a strict, common alignment. These mixture crystals in frozen meals can differ in dimension, from microscopic and clean on the palate to plainly seen with a grainy texture (the velvety texture of well-churned ice cream in comparison with the sharp shards of a granita, for instance).
What determines the dimensions of these crystals?
I like to think about water as a room scattered with Tinkertoys and stable ice because the constructions my daughter’s first-grade classmates would possibly erect out of them. If you ask them to place items collectively as quick as they will, little or no collaboration will happen. Your room will find yourself filled with many small constructions. If, however, you give them extra time, they might begin haphazardly, constructing just a few small initiatives right here and there, however finally the attract of extra-large towers can have them working collectively, cannibalizing the smaller constructions so as to add to the larger ones. You wind up with fewer, bigger buildings.
So it’s with ice formation. Ice crystals, like toy skyscrapers, take time to construct. And identical to these toy skyscrapers, the speed at which they’re fashioned makes a giant distinction. As described in a May 2020 article in Food Engineering Reviews, a journal protecting meals science and the meals trade, when water freezes slowly, smaller ice crystals tend to spontaneously remelt in a course of often called recalescence, and merge into bigger crystals, which proceed to develop like amoebas, absorbing smaller, less-stable crystals.
Put merely, in the case of the dimensions of ice crystals, the longer it takes meals to freeze, the bigger the crystals can be. The bigger the ice crystals, the extra mobile harm they will trigger. The extra mobile harm prompted, the extra moisture will leak out throughout defrosting. And the extra liquid leaked out, the limper your thawed produce can be.
Thus, if limiting mobile harm is the objective, you then wish to freeze meals as shortly as potential. In a industrial kitchen, one would possibly depend on extraordinarily chilly liquids like liquid nitrogen, or use blast chillers, freezers saved at 40 levels under zero or colder and outfitted with highly effective followers designed to quickly draw warmth away from meals. Like an air-fryer, however in reverse.
