Category: ice

The Clear Ice Maker That Already Exists

So you know how I've been working for months on a way to make clear ice, and figured out that the best way (so far) to do it is with an Igloo cooler?

It turns out that someone else thought of that at least a couple of years ago. The Polar Ice Tray is basically a high-design cooler that separates the cloudy part of the ice from the clear part.

They accomplish this with an interior perforated bucket of sorts. The last part to freeze, the bottom, will have all the cloudy parts in it, and that is below the bucket.

According to the instructions, you break off the cloudy part outside the bucket after it is frozen.

Pretty cool. More information is here.

It looks like it works as well as my Igloo cooler method, and is just a bit smaller holding about 2.5 cups worth of ice. I've got more experiments to do though…

An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

November 24, 2010
Fortune Ice: Like A Fortune Cookie But With Ice
In my latest set of fun experiments with ice, I created fortune ice.

I'd been meaning to do this for a while, but two things made it actually happen. First, I bought a Tovolo King Cube Ice Cube Tray to make 2-inch cubes. Second, I realized I could use my Label Maker for the fortunes.

I was thinking that I would have to make fortunes then laminate them, but the label maker spits out labels that are plasticy on both sides.

This is one case where I didn't want perfectly clear ice (learn how to make clear ice here) because then you could read the fortunes in the cubes before they melted.

It turns out that the cloudiness in water does well to hide the paper in ice.

I froze the cubes with the fortunes inside, then let them thaw out. When some of the fortune was sticking out from the cube, I could pull it from the end and they slid out: No need to wait until the whole thing melted.

I wanted to make sure the paper didn't disintegrate in water, so I left a few fortunes in a glass of water overnight and they showed no signs of deterioration. However I should try this again with alcohol.

So, that was fun!

Possible uses for fortune ice could include:
- Fortunes, just like fortune cookies.
- Giveaways/prizes. One fortune contains a coupon for a free drink, door prize, etc.
- Cocktail recipes for the drink that you're drinking.
- Advertising. "Next time make this drink with our brand of whisky!"
- The bartender's phone number. "Call me, hot stuff."
An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.
November 15, 2010
Does Refreezing Clear Air-Free Ice Result In a Large Clear Block?
This is an experiment in my ongoing project to make clear ice. I've figured out a way to do it using an Igloo cooler. This experiment is an attempt to make clear ice without one.

A long time ago, I tested the theory that freezing, thawing, and refreezing water makes clear ice blocks. After 13 tries I determined that it refreezing water does not make clearer ice.

However, it recently occurred to me that I could test out something else. If we take just the clear part of ice (leaving behind the cloudy, air-rich stuff), melt it and refreeze it, will the new ice be clear?

A bar in San Francisco refreezes their Kold-Draft cubes. One bartender told me he thought it makes clearer ice than with just tap water, but still not completely clear.

If this experiment works, then someone anyone could refreeze small bits of clear ice into large blocks. Efficient? Nope. But interesting.

(Oh, and long story short: this experiment was inconclusive. Don't want to make you read if you're not into it.)

Anyway, step one was to make clear ice, as I do using the Igloo cooler method. I made two partial blocks of ice. I let the water freeze in the cooler, then knock off the thin skin that forms around the bottom of the cooler (full of water).

Then I took these two clear slabs, broke them into large chunks, and put them into the cooler to melt.

After it melted, I refroze it.

The ice in the picture above is upside-down from how it was in the cooler. Here's a closeup.

At first view, it looks a little cloudy in the middle of the bloc- but I think that's because I had to move my refrigerator a couple of times during this process and jostling the container does seem to make cloudier ice.

Looking just at the cloudy part at the bottom end (top in the picture above), I can't really say whether it's less cloudy than it is with regular tap water. This experiment is inconclusive.

My theory is that as the water cools down or warms up to room temperature it reabsorbs a standard amount of air, and this experiment won't work. However:

If I repeat this experiment (and I probably will), I should:
- Make the clear ice as normal, but not break up the slab into chunks. This saved time but probably adds air.
- Use more refrozen water in the cooler when refreezing. Here is was a little too hard to tell what percentage of ice was cloudy, so I could not compare it with the time I did this experiment with regular water.
The icesperiments continue!

An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.
November 5, 2010
Cutting Blocks of Ice with an Icepick

update 2021 Better ice cutting pictures are on this post.

To cut the large blocks of clear ice that I make at home using and Igloo cooler (methodology here), I have always busted out the saw I bought for that reason.

However, last week I gave a talk on ice at Portland Cocktail Week with Evan Zimmerman and Jim Romdall. During the talk one of them (Evan I think) mentioned how you use an ice pick to cut apart a block of ice the easy way.

I cringed thinking of all the time I'd spent sawing when this way is like 1000 times easier. I hope I can save you from the same fate.

1. Start with your slab of ice. The one in this picture is about 5 inches thick.

2. Tap a line across the top where you want the ice to break. The ice will chip off and form a little groove.

3. Tap in one point in the center. Poke hard. Poke poke poke.

4. The ice should break in two roughly along the line. Hooray!

5. Repeat the process to break it into smaller pieces.

An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

November 1, 2010
More Fun with Ice: The Time Bomb

The fun with ice continues! In ongoing experiments freezing things in ice, I decided to try freezing food coloring in the middle of an ice cube. Then when the ice melts, the coloring will release and change the drink.

Click on the link below to see how I did it and what happened.

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October 28, 2010
Using Salt Walter as an Insulator to Make Clear Ice

This blog post is a continuation of this experiment.

In this experiment, I wanted to test out another way to insulate an ice cube tray to make clear ice. Inspired by a comment from another blog entry by a reader named Gael, I decided to try salt water as an insulator rather than just plain water as in the last experiment. If it worked, this would be a way to make clear ice at home without taking up too much freezer space.

I took a small food container and put it into a slightly larger one. The smaller container held only water. The outer container held water with table salt. The theory is that the salt water would not freeze, so it would act as an insulator for the ice, and control the direction of freezing so that it would only freeze from the top-down (as with the cooler method).

I didn't use a ton of salt. As you can see, the outer container's water did freeze lightly,though it was soft. The bottom did not completely freeze, as you can sort of see here.

The inner container did seem to freeze toward the bottom.

In better-insulated containers, the cloudy part is only on the bottom of the container. Here, it is concentrated but raised slightly above the bottom of the container.

In this case the inner container sat directly on the bottom of the outer container, so it wasn't greatly insulated on the bottom. My theory is that this is why the cloudy part of the ice is raised above the bottom.

To improve this experiment, I would put raise the inner container off the bottom of the outer container, and probably use a greater amount of salt in the salt water.

As the outer container here is only slightly larger than the inner container, this system is more space-efficient than the Igloo cooler for many people without large freezers.

There's more work to do on this…

An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

October 26, 2010
Making Clear Ice Without a Cooler
In a set of experiments, I showed that you can make clear ice by controling the direction of freezing. The container I've been using for this is an Igloo cooler. When using it, the ice freezes from the top-down and all the cloudiness in the ice forms at the bottom of the container rather than in the middle of the block.

I wanted to show that you can do this without a cooler as long as you have some sort of insultation that accomplishes the same thing as the cooler. In this case, I chose a bigger pool of water as an insulator.

As a control I froze a plastic take-out container of water in the freezer.

As usual, it is cloudy over a large area, mostly in the center. This is because the water freezes from the outside-in. The last part of the ice to freeze contains air and any impurities, and is cloudy.

So then I took the same container and put it into a larger container. The smaller container sits on cubes to keep it off the bottom of the larger container.

Both containers were filled with water to about the same level. The purpose of this is to use the outer container of water as an insulator. The water inside the smaller container would then freeze only from the top-down instead of outside-in, because the water surrounding it would freeze later (because it is so big).

The results show that this worked- the cloudy part of the ice was the last part to freeze at the bottom of the container.

What this means:
- Directional freezing works as long as there is an insulated jacket around the container. The ice freezes only from the top-down, pushing the cloudy part to the bottom.
- This property could be exploited to make an ice cube tray that makes cloudy-on-the-bottom ice. Picture, for example, an ice cube tray that was insulated with a jacket on the sides and bottom.
- So now I can do more experiments to make an insultated jacket that is practical.
An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.
October 22, 2010
Freezing Objects in Ice

As you know I've been making clear ice at home. I've got a lot more experimenting to do, but for now I thought I'd try freezing a bottle inside a block.

I started with a mini bottle of Chambord, since it's the flashiest one I own. I tied a piece of fishing line around the neck of the bottle and suspended it in my ice-making cooler. I tied the top around a ruler to hold it above the cooler.

Happily it stayed in place while freezing. I popped out the block.

This block was cloudier than usual. I'm not sure if that's because of the object in the ice or not.

It looks a little better close up, so I cut the ice closer to the bottle.

It's not perfect, but it would make a great chunk of ice for a punch bowl.

An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

September 28, 2010
A Homemade Giant, Crystal Clear Ice Cube Tray
As you're probably aware, I've been dabbling in experiments making clear ice at home. [update: An organized index of ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.] The way I've found that works best is to freeze ice in an Igloo cooler with the top off. (Please read the post before you tell me to boil the water in the comments- it doesn't work.)

This is now how I make all my ice at home- I haven't used trays in months.

Now I am working on ways to best carve ice and also trying to create an ice cube tray that will work in this directional freezing system. I found a method that works that I need to perfect.

Here's what I've done.

I went down to The Container Store and purchased these plastic gift boxes. They're 2 inches by 2 inches wide (4.5 centimeters) and around 5 inches tall (11.5 cm) with the tops off.

These I put in my Igloo cooler. I've done it with the open top of the container facing up, and also facing down. Facing down works better, actually, because the air in the rectangles gets pushed out the bottom. Facing up, you get a 1cm cloudy patch at the top of the cubes. No big whoop.

Then I fill the cooler with water and freeze it. It comes out as a block of ice with the cubes stuck in it.

These separate surprisingly easily from the block.

Also surprisingly easy is how the ice pops out of these plastic containers. I just leave them upside-down for a couple minutes and the ice cubes slice right out.

As you can see in the above picture, there is a little bit of cloudiness when the trays are left with the open part facing up. I repeated this experiment with the open part facing down and there was less cloudiness. Either way, there isn't much to worry about as it can be cut off when cutting these big long cubes down to 2 inch by 2 inch by 2 inch ones.

Conclusions:
- These ice cubes are fricking awesome.
- I need to try it with cutting off the bottom of the containers so that they're a rectangular tube rather than a box.
- I think this is actually scalable to make an ice cube tray with some tweaking.
- Hooray!
An index of ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.
August 27, 2010
Ice Meets Chainsaw

Ice nerds got a real treat this Tuesday, for Andrew Bohrer from Seattle was guest bartending in San Francisco along with Amanda Womack from Cask.

He brought chainsaw Thursday to the city in order to chop up giant blocks of clear ice from an industrial ice maker into big cubes that could be further cut into ice balls.

Keep scrolling for videos of hand ice carving… or click here for an index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics.

First they cut slices off the big blocks, then cut those into long rectangles. Then they cut those into cubes.

Click below for the videos.

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August 12, 2010