Last Friday you might have spotted a familiar face on your tv screens, as Antonelli’s very own National Technical Manager Jonny Ireland joined Blue Peter and the team at Sent Into Space for an out of this world experiment, creating and sending ice cream into space.
Antonelli’s involvement with the show actually began during a ‘So You Want To Make Gelato’ course at our training academy, which saw Graeme (a cameraman who works with Blue Peter) attend, who loved the course so much so that he ultimately contacted Jonny to discuss the experiment and ask his advice on the best way to send ice cream into space. After discussing the appropriate temperatures, the ideal machinery and the ice cream itself (blue of course), Antonelli was asked to be a part of the show as its expert advisor.
Organised in a celebration of Science Week, the plan was to utilise a weather balloon that would take a small ice cream machine mounted on a platform up into the atmosphere, where the balloon would burst and the ice cream (in the machine) would fall back down to earth.
To achieve this, Blue Peter partnered with Sent Into Space, a company that specialises in (you guessed it) sending items into space. With over 1000 space explorations under their belt, covering everything from chicken nuggets to an entire art exhibition, they were the ideal partners.
After a call between Antonelli and Matt, a scientist from Sent Into Space, it was determined that the ice cream maker would run as it rose until it reached -7°c, just as we would for a batch freezer, subsequently, as the balloon continued to rise to the atmosphere, it would reach -65°c, similar (but a bit colder!) to that of a blast freezer. It was hoped that by the time it made it back to down to earth, the temperature of the ice cream would be -20°c, and perfectly scoopable (more on that later).
Of course, our traditional base needed to be tweaked to what we liked to refer to as the perfect ‘space base’. So, the night before filming, Antonelli prepped our ‘space base’, aged the mixture and collected our iconic cones alongside personalised Blue Peter wafers. On the day, Jonny, alongside Blue Peter host, Joel Mawhinney, were filmed using the base to create the ice cream recipe, using Comprital’s Baby Blue, broken Em & Em’s, hundreds and thousands and silver stars.
After this everybody jumped into the Blue Peter van and travelled to a field in Yorkshire, where the mixture was poured into the ice cream maker, the balloon was inflated and it began to rise into the atmosphere. After chasing the balloon from Yorkshire and into Lincolnshire, the balloon reached the atmosphere, burst and flew back own to earth where it landed on the side of a road.
Now, the results weren’t quite as we expected, as what we found on the side of the road in Lincolnshire was liquid, not the perfectly scoopable ice cream that we hoped to see. From a food science perspective, it should have worked, however when we reached the media room and reviewed footage of the balloon we saw it batch freeze and stop beating at -7°c. However, once the balloon reached the atmosphere, we saw the ice cream begin to build up and expand, appearing to part boil and part freeze. Therefore by the time the ice cream landed the mixture was so thin that it wasn’t possible to freeze.
So, was it a success? In theory yes, we did indeed help Blue Peter to create ice cream in space, it just didn’t land on earth in the same state!
After filming concluded, and without a delicious ice cream to enjoy, everybody on the team was rather hungry, so Antonelli called up one of our lovely clients, Porters Pizza (owned by Mike and Viv) who were very accommodating, and supplied us with pizza and ice cream (just not the space kind).
All in all, it was a wonderful experience and Antonelli couldn’t be prouder to have been a part of such an interesting experiment. Not to mention, our very own Jonny received a Blue Peter badge!
You can watch the full episode here.
