New Forest Ice Cream is made using our special family recipe and only the very best, natural ingredients. To discover more, click on the short video, or read below for a sneak peek into what goes into making our delicious ice cream.
On average, we receive two tanker deliveries every week, each containing 8000 litres of milk. By working with carefully selected farmers we ensure that we buy only the very best, freshest milk which arrives at the optimum temperature of between 3°c and 5°c for ultimate freshness.
After unloading, the milk is immediately tested, using the very latest delvotest kits, which are seen as the gold standard in the global dairy industry to meet increasingly stringent global legislation and quality demands.
Pasteurisation is essential to ensure that bacteria is not present in the mix. This is achieved by heating our mixes to 67°C and holding it at the exact temperature for 30 minutes. By using high shear agitators in our pasteurisers we are able to ensure that all the ingredients are fully blended.
Homogenisation is the part in the process after pasteurisation which forces the mix through a tiny gap at pressures of around 2000psi. This process is important for breaking down the fat molecules within the mix which when frozen and eaten, will ensure that the last bite is a creamy as the first.
Once the mix has been pasteurised it needs to be cooled down quickly before being made into ice cream. This is done by using a Plate Heat Exchanger which rapidly cools the mix from 67°C to an ideal 5°C. Incredibly this takes just seconds and ensures that the mix stays fresh.
The mix is then transferred to an ageing vat where the flavours and colours are added.
Once the mix has been coloured, flavoured and aged it is then ready to be frozen down into ice cream. To do this we pump it from the ageing vat into the ice cream freezer where the mix goes in as a liquid around 3°C and comes out as ice cream around -6°C
When the ice cream leaves the freezer it can then be diverted to a number of filling lines and filled into containers. If the ice cream is to have an inclusion added, such as chocolate pieces, fruit preparations or ripples, then the ice cream will pass through relevant equipment such as fruit feeders or ripple pumps before reaching the containers.
After filling the container, the lid is placed on securely before a number of further checks are carried out such as metal detection; weight, volume and inclusion checking; date/batch coding etc.
Once the containers have been put into the relevant packaging they are then placed into our blast freezer, which will rapidly freeze the ice cream from -6°C to -24°C within 24 hours. By freezing it so quickly, we are able to stop large ice crystals from forming to give the ice cream a lovely smooth feel when eaten.
