Banana Waste Slower-Melting Ice Cream

Licking an ice cream is favorite of many  during summer. Summers are there on the way. Sitting in a car, finding ice cream vendor on the road side is very common. Buying an ice cream, licking gives very soothing effect. If some time lapses to lick the ice cream, it get melts quickly and the whole enthusiasm goes. The question arises, why we cannot stop or slower down the  melting of the ice cream?

Ingredients also affect how ice cream melts. Cream, sugar, eggs and things such as chocolate chips, cookie dough and fudge go into ice cream. One of the most important ingredients, however, is fat. It gives ice cream its creamy texture. It also helps determine how fast it melts.

Nonfat  ice cream will melt more slowly than regular ice cream because it contains more water. More water means the ice cream will have to absorb more energy before it can melt. Also, low-fat ice creams tend to have more air whipped into them, which allows them to keep their shape longer.

The answer along with the solution  is now available. Colombia University Scientist has developed  a cellulose from the Banana Waste, which can be added to the ice cream  for slower melting ice cream.

Banana plants can offer many benefits:

- They make great windbreaks or screens,

- They can keep the sun of the hot western side of your house,

- They utilize the water and nutrients in waste drains (think washing water or outdoor shower),

- The leaves can be fed to horses, cows and other grazers,

- The dried remains of the trunks can be used for weaving baskets and mats.

Bananas grow on trees in closely-grouped bunches, and each of those bunches is in turn is attached to a central stalk. When all the bunches are picked, the leftover stalks are simply discarded. 

But a team led by Dr. Robin Zuluaga Gallego ground up some of the stalks and extracted cellulose nanofibrils from them. Nanofibrils are tiny fibres that are thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair. These flavourless nanofibrils were subsequently added to ice cream, at concentrations ranging up to 0.3 gram per 100 grams of ice cream.

It was found that adding nanofibrils to the dessert caused it to melt much more slowly than conventional ice cream. Not only does this mean that people could take longer eating it in hot weather, but it also means that the ice cream is less sensitive to the sort of temperature changes that occur when it's taken in and out of the freezer – this could prolong its shelf life.

Nanofibril-enriched low-fat ice cream proved to have a higher viscosity than its regular counterpart, improving creaminess and texture. It is believed that this is due to the nanofibrils helping to stabilize the fat structure of the ice cream. If that is the case, then it's possible that the nanofibrils could be used to replace some of the fats in ice cream, bringing its calorie count down.