Jeni’s ice cream has a pretty good texture, very dense and similar to haagen dazs or van leeuwen, which are custard-style. It seems like it must have emulsifiers.
Which of these ingredients contribute the most in terms of emulsifying? I assume it’s the tapioca syrup and the honey? This is from their honey vanilla flavor.
by chizu_baga
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Yes. Tapioca syrup is used for this.
Tapioca syrup mostly, honeys a relatively weak emulsifier. Although the main reason for these is probably as a sweetener more than anything
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Jeni has some very high tech equipment that manipulates the dairy to get the emulsifying and stabilizing properties without using added emulsifiers or stabilizers. It’s kind of like how all store bought orange juice only has one ingredient, but the flavor is created through a process of adding lots of orange extracts and other orange-derived products to get the flavor without revealing any ingredients other than orange
The emulsifier role is handled 100% by the milk proteins. Jeni uses a recipe high in milk solids, and the dairy that she contracts with starts with raw milk, so the pasteurization can be done completely to her specifications. The idea is to partially denature the whey proteins, exposing active surfaces that have similar qualities to other emulsifying ingredients. All these emulsifiers work, counterintuitively by destabilizing (weakening) the dairy emulsion. [Long-winded explanation here](https://under-belly.org/ice-cream-emulsifiers/).
The tapioca syrup is a stabilizer, which has a function different from the emulsifiers. Tapioca is a starch; it thickens the liquid phase of the ice cream, just as flour or cornstarch or arrowroot starch thicken sauces. It also has properties that help suppress the growth of ice crystals, keeping the texture smooth longer. Other stabilizing ingredients are more effective than tapioca, but tapioca can work well enough, and is popular because it doesn’t sound scary to people who are afraid of ingredients with lots of strange syllables.