Low-fat, sugar-free, high-fibre ice cream that still retains all the smooth, creamy decadence of its more guilt-inducing counterpart – it seems like a recipe that could only be concocted in Willy Wonka's fictional factory. But there's a frozen-treat-obsessed scientist at the University of Guelph who may just make healthy ice cream a reality.
Doug Goff – recognized by New York magazine as the world's leading expert in ice cream – and his graduate students have been behind some of the most important innovations in the dairy product's history.
Double-churned ice cream was first developed in his lab.
He helped find a way to change the very chemical structure of soft-serve ice cream to extend its shelf life.
And now he's tinkering with winter wheat – an antifreeze agent – to make a product that can be sold at room temperature and transform into ice cream in a home freezer.
His scientific peers may envy his status as King of the Creams, but it's been a long time coming: Dr. Goff, a bespectacled, silver-haired man of 49, grew up surrounded by frozen treats.
His father was the plant manager at the Brookfield ice cream factory in Nova Scotia and so he spent his teen years doing odd jobs at the factory.
After completing an undergraduate degree in dairy science at the University of Guelph, he knew he wanted to study ice cream to benefit the masses, rather than one company's profit margin. It's no surprise that industry giants have tried to lure Dr. Goff away from his lab to work on their research and development teams, but the professor has continually refused. At his core, Dr. Goff is a man of science, and he's on a mission to prove ice cream can be good for you.
When Doug Goff whips up ice cream in his lab, he makes it vanilla, a flavour he says makes it impossible to hide taste defects.
“It's healthy from the point of view that it's got all of the milk nutrients in it – so it's not a junk food by any means at all,” he explained. He does acknowledge the obvious: For all its bone-fortifying calcium, ice cream is also packed with fat. But he's been trying to get around that.
Ice cream mix doubles in size after it goes through a freezer where air is whipped into it. While traditional ice-cream makers are comprised of a set of two nesting bowls and a crank, in Dr. Goff's lab of gleaming stainless steel equipment, the continuous pasteurization tank – an enormous steel vat – has the capacity to prepare 600 litres of mix. The continuous freezer is a beast of a machine that can produce 300 litres of ice cream in an hour.
Through experimentation, Dr. Goff realized the trick to making low-fat ice cream taste like it's full-fat was to distribute the same amount of fat throughout ice cream, but in the form of smaller globules. Since he reported his results in the Journal of Dairy Science and the Journal of Food Biochemistry, his contacts at ice-cream companies have been asking him all about the innovation.
“Food and health is the real big buzz thing that's going on in our industry. It should have been all along but it hasn't been for some reason,” he said. “I think finally the market is coming around.”
