Tags
Luke Beckman did not really know anything about making ice cream before starting his student job at the dairy plant in the Department of Food Science and Technology’s Food Processing Center. What he did know was that he liked ice cream and engineering, both of which came in handy.
“It started with small tasks — cleaning, painting the floors, stuff like that,” said Beckman, a junior biological systems engineering major from Malcolm. “Once I started getting into making ice cream, there was definitely more of a learning curve.”
Most of us only encounter the dairy plant’s ice cream in all its delicious, fully formed glory at the UNL Dairy Store on East Campus. The process of getting there, Beckman learned, is as much a feat of science as it is culinary expertise.
“It’s a little bit of thermodynamics and a little bit of statics,” Beckman said. “We’re moving lots of thermal energy around, and different flavors require different steps and temperatures.”
Those concepts, the same ones he’s learning about in his biological systems engineering coursework, have taught him some practical lessons about ice cream creation.
"You start to learn, ‘oh, this flavor freezes slower because it has this ingredient that makes it harder to freeze,’” Beckman said. “For example, Husker Ice takes a lot longer to freeze than vanilla because there's a higher sugar content.”
The more complicated the flavor, the more factors — and greater potential for mess — that come into play.
“Some flavors, like Scarlet and Cream, require us to set up a separate machine to pump in filling,” Beckman said. “Once, we worked with a flavor that required brownie bits that ended up clogging up our machines and we ended up having to rig larger pipes that could accommodate the brownie bits. It was a pretty big mess.”
Still, Beckman finds the challenging days are more than worth it.
“The problem solving, that's what’s really fun," Beckman said. "Things like, 'How do we make this flavor that needs this piece and this piece? How can we make it with the shortest amount of piping or with this machine?’
“Plus, sometimes we get to taste test new ice creams. That's never a downside.”
