Ice cream is a kind of volume-expanding frozen food, which is made of drinking water, milk, milk powder, cream (or vegetable oil) and sugar as main raw materials, and adding a proper amount of food additives through mixing, sterilization, homogenization, aging, freezing and hardening.

Ice cream is developed from frozen food. As early as 1 century, the king of ancient Rome told slaves to collect snow and ice from the mountains in summer for freezing fruits, honey and juice. The king often entertains his minions and foreign envoys with these frozen foods in summer.

Some researchers believe that ice cream originated in China. As early as 65,438+0,000 years ago, feudal princes asked people to take ice in winter, store it in the cellar and take it out in summer to enjoy it.

At the end of the Tang Dynasty, people mined a large amount of saltpeter in the production of gunpowder, and accidentally found that saltpeter dissolved in cold water would absorb a lot of heat and even freeze the water. From then on, people can make ice in summer without storing ice. At this time, there are merchants specializing in selling summer ice. They added sugar to the ice to attract customers.

In the Song Dynasty, there were more frozen food patterns on the market. Merchants will also add fruit or juice to it. Merchants in the Yuan Dynasty even added fruit pulp and milk to the ice. This kind of frozen food is considered as primitive ice cream.

1848, scientists invented a manual freezer, which enabled people to make their own ice cream at home. At that time, people put the mixture of ice cream into small stainless steel containers and then put it into wooden barrels. Pour the ice cubes into the wooden bucket, so that the ice cubes are evenly distributed around the stainless steel container. Then two minutes later, turn the hand-cranked freezer to completely cool the ice cream ingredients, and then add salt to the ice to freeze the ice cream.

The development of condensed milk and solid milk, together with the invention of homogenizer, pasteur sterilizer and freezer, stimulated the development of early ice cream industry. In the development of ice cream industry, the most remarkable progress is the invention of continuous mixer in 1925.