Whether it was a trip to the zoo or a simple walk along the lakefront in Chicago, one colorful vendor cart always sent me to my mom pleading for money for a little treat. The tiny ice cream pearls from the Dippin' Dots cart are a novelty you can't ignore on a hot summer day. But, did you know these tasty beads came from a love of science and not just dessert? That's right, Dippin' Dots were an intricate science experiment at the start, perfected by a microbiologist and Illinois native named Curt Jones.
Jones was a cryogenics expert who was explaining his job (flash-freezing animal food) to his family in 1987 when he had the idea to freeze tiny beads of ice cream using liquid nitrogen. As with any scientific endeavor, trial and error played a major role in the creation of Dippin' Dots. However, after experimentation, Jones was able to perfect the process to create little beads of cryogenically frozen, yet still creamy, ice cream.
How Dippin' Dots were invented Transforming something like ice cream, which has been around for centuries and has soft, even consistency, into tiny edible marbles took scientific experiments and calculations to make happen. The key to Dippin' Dots' creation was temperature and timing. The ice cream base had to be submerged in liquid nitrogen to create the beads, but the mixture had to be dripped into the chamber of liquid nitrogen in a specific way to achieve the desired shape.
The entire process had to be done at a certain rate so the beads of ice cr.
