What do you make of these ingredients in Ice Cream

Where are people getting the idea that Xanthan gum comes from corn?It does not. It is harvested from bacteria (Xanthomonas campestris).

If you are using a cook-up custard to start with, your custard will thicken but will also get ropy or the term is snotty when you pour a spoonful out as you stir. That is definitely a good way to tell if you are using too much Xanthan gum so you need to cut your amount down. You sometimes see that effect in cheap, fat free salad dressings.

It takes less gum than a starch because a gum holds much, much more water than a starch. Where you might use a tablespoonful of cornstarch, you would only use maybe 1/8 teaspoon of gum and that might be a little too much. Gums go into liquid if they are mixed with other dry ingredients or they have heat treated to dissolve instantly. Those are usually only sold commercially so you would not be able to buy them on the internet.

My husband makes a "to die for" cooked vanilla and chocolate custard and freezes it. But it is as hard as a rock after freezing. I am still working on him to let me modify the formula to give us softer (not soft-serve) ice cream. I have a masters in food science but I am going to have to make a separate batch to prove it to him. To most people, anything other than flour or corn starch to thicken must be a chemical. Hope that helps.

Hydrocolloids like Guar and Xanthan gum don't prevent the ice cream from melting, rather they change the texture (more like jello). There are other ice cream additives. Instead, I'd recommend optimizing the physics before enlisting chemical help.

What happens is that the ice cream batter mixture warms up during the churning process and loses consistency (melts). The best defence against melting ice cream is working in lower temperatures:

• Make sure the ice cream maker bowl/machine is properly cold (-16°C, or 0°F minimum). Get it as cold as you can get it.
• Put your ice cream batter in the freezer for half an hour to an hour before making the ice cream to keep it just above the freezing point.
• Working in a colder room helps as well.

You should be able to get great results using these simple steps, however, if it still looks like a losing battle, you can also try pre-cooling your churing bowl with dry ice. (if you throw the dry ice in the ice cream batter, you may get a tangy ice cream).

Afterwards, put the remainder of the dry ice in a container next to your machine and cover them both loosely with a tarp (keep the place ventilated) to keep the air around the ice cream batter and machine cold.