What Are the Requirements for Using CMC in Ice-cream?

Ice-cream is one of the rapidly developing foods in recent years. With the rapid economic development and continuous improvement of people's living standards, the demand for various fancy ice-creams is also increasing. Although the amount of thickening stabilizers added to ice-cream is only about 0.5%, it plays a critical role in the quality and taste of ice-cream.

Understanding CMC for Ice-cream

Compared with other materials such as starch and guar gum, carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) can quickly dissolve in both cold and hot water. Its aqueous solution has high transparency and fluidity, and can produce stable network structures at different temperatures. CMC food additive is insensitive to temperature changes during storage and it's product structure stable. Therefore, sodium carboxymethyl cellulose can enhance the anti-melting property of ice-cream.

The viscosity of the aqueous solution of carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) is higher than that of xanthan gum, gelatin, and sodium alginate, and it is also very compatible with these colloids. When used in combination with these colloids, viscosity doubles. Therefore, in the use of CMC for ice-cream, it can increase the viscosity of the mixture and liquid under the premise of homogenization and aging.

Carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) is a highly hydrophilic colloid that can quickly combine with free water in materials and liquids, uniformly distribute in the mixture, and stir to make air form ultra-fine bubbles, making the ice-cream texture delicate and good in taste, at the same time, it can also increase the expansion rate of the product. Sodium carboxymethyl cellulose can play a certain emulsification role. Using CMC for ice-cream not only can capture calcium in the mixture but also dissociate casein molecule clusters, increase the emulsification ability of protein and fat, and reduce the cohesiveness of fat, which plays a certain role in homogenizing ice-cream mixtures.

Requirements for CMC for ice-cream

When CMC for ice-cream is used as a stabilizer, there are some special requirements. In order to improve the uniformity of the mixture, sodium carboxymethyl cellulose should have a rich pseudo-plasticity to increase the shape retention of ice-cream. Therefore, it is important to select reliable sodium carboxymethyl cellulose suppliers. In addition, the viscosity of carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) should be high, measured by Brookfield rotational viscometer or NDJ-1 viscometer, the mass fraction of sodium carboxymethyl cellulose should be 2%, and the viscosity should be 15 to 20 Pa·s. Currently, there are more fruit-flavored ice-creams, and the pH value of their mixtures is acidic. Therefore, sodium carboxymethyl cellulose is required to have a high degree of substitution, good reaction uniformity, and tolerance to certain acids. For industrial production of ice-cream with high-temperature short-time sterilization, good thermal stability of sodium carboxymethyl cellulose is also required. Therefore, the quality requirements for CMC for ice-cream are very high, with a degree of substitution of 0.80 to 0.85 and a viscosity ratio greater than 0.80, with good transparency of its solution.