With the sudden cold snap in the Southern states, it is possibly the least seasonal time of the year to be talking about ice cream or investigating it as happened on episode three of the Food Investigators.

Like my current morning commute, the process to make ice cream, industrial or otherwise, is a battle against ice crystals. Constantly stirring the mixture in a machine (or if you’re a Luddite masochist, by hand) stops hard edged ice crystals from forming and ensures that smooth, creamy texture. It was a little dismaying when Food Investigators’ dietician Hanan Saleh pulled out a random punnet of industrial ice cream and looking at the encyclopaedic list of ingredients commented that “These emulsifiers and vegetable gums are what makes the end product so creamy and tasty”.

The key effect of gums such as guar gum, locust bean gum, xanthan gum, the seaweed extract carageenan or methylcellulose is to help prevent ice crystals from forming during freezing and, importantly for a commercial ice cream, limits crystallisation when ice cream refreezes. Poor handling by you or the supermarket can be hidden by the gums. Emulsifiers stabilise the mix of unblendable ingredients; the fat and water in milk and cream in better ice creams, or vegetable oil and water in worse ones.

The best ice cream has four or five ingredients: milk, cream, sugar and whatever flavour you can imagine. There is five if you make it from custard in the French style and use egg yolks, which act as an emulsifier. No gums or other emulsifiers are necessary when you make your own ice cream.

What makes the end product so creamy and tasty is not the additives. It's fat. The more real ice cream that you eat, the less satisfying and more unreal that gum-filled icecream tastes. Reduced fat icecream begins to taste much like flavoured shaving foam.

If you want to test out simple ice cream making at home, it’s a simple experiment in home thermodynamics. All you will need is a large Ziploc bag, a smaller Ziploc bag, a cup of salt, a kilo of ice cubes, half a cup of milk, half a cup of cream, a quarter of a cup of sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla essence.

Place the milk, cream, sugar and vanilla essence in the small bag and seal.

Place the ice and salt in the large Ziploc bag. Place the sealed, small Ziploc bag into the larger bag and seal. Holding the bag with a tea towel, shake the bags for about 15 minutes, checking the smaller bag every five or so minutes as to the consistency of the mix. After your quarter of an hour of shaking, you’ll have ice cream in the small bag. Eat.

 If you get serious about ice cream and invest in a machine to do the work, you will really struggle to eat 100grams in a single sitting as Food Investigators suggests. Simple home made ice cream is dense, heavy and more satisfying than the foamy and gummy commercial ice cream. You shouldn’t eat it more than once a week but at least, it’s worth the wait.