Now you can have your own delicious and hopefully emergency room-free chemistry demo at Lulu & Mooky’s, a tiny new LES ice cream parlor where a dude in a lab coat will make you liquid nitrogen ice cream from one of 45 suggested flavors or one of your own invention.
Watch out though – not all flavor combinations will taste great. Our mango-kiwi monster tasted like tuna and garnered 6 votes for “yucky”. Rosemary & burnt sugar flavor got 5 “yum” votes though! Other favorites were red sour cherry & pear, and ginger.
Liquid nitrogen (or LN2) has been a darling ingredient of many molecular gastronomists, and for good reason. Making ice cream with LN2 has several advantages to the regular fridge and/or ice approaches:
- fewer crystals form, so the ice cream ends up with a very buttery texture
- the freezing process is almost instant, so ice cream can be made fresh for each customer.
Watching ice cream being made with funky fog is part of the fun, but because it took 2 minutes to process each order, we were wondering how Lulu & Mooky’s would handle big crowds in the summer time. As a group of generous business consultants and entrepreneurs, we offered lots of free business advice to the dude in the lab coat – we’ll see if L&M will listen! ☺
Rating (1-10)
Presentation: 9 (We loved watching LN2 in action, but we would have liked to see the parlor decorated with more color or possibly with photos of extremely attractive people eating their ice cream – we told L&M they can always use our slideshow!)
Taste: 7 (hit or miss. Avoid the mango-kiwi combination, as well as flavors #46 and 47 - click on the slideshow to discover what they are)
Texture: 8 (very creamy)
Price: $4 for 1 cup (2 scoops)
Liquid nitro is certainly cool to play with, however complete precaution must be administered while using it. Hospitals, medical labs and physicists take the help of dewars to store it. May be its time that chefs also start doing that.
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