To prevent it from melting in the dish, ice cream should be served on chilled dinnerware, and the dining room’s ambient temperature lowered to between -12 and -14 C.
Totally false.
Ice cream is better right when it’s on the verge of melting. That makes it creamier and also makes it more flavorful since cold numbs the tastebuds.
I’d read that -12 and -14 C is the ideal serving temperature, but that may be on the assumption that the reader isn’t chilling their dining room, and so assumes ambient heating.
If that’s the case, then we’d need to find out what the ideal eating temperature is, and then serve the ice cream at that temperature in a room of that temperature.
The problem, I think, is that you actually want to catch it while melting. It is optimal when it’s not at thermal equilibrium, so it’s partially but not completely melted.
Like, there’s a reason most people prefer ice cream to ice cream soup, but you also don’t want it completely frozen. You want it in that mixed state where it’s kinda melty but not totally melted.
Note that “completely frozen” for ice cream is more like -20 C. Ice cream gets softer and softer at it warms before truly melting, so the situation you’re imagining may still be below 0 C.
I’ve recently had ice cream sandwiches that came out of the freezer unacceptably soft but which, based on subsequent measurement of the freezer’s temp, would have been -5 C.
(As an aside: this is also an unacceptably high freezer temperature for food safety concerns. A freezer should be around -18 C.)
the dishes themselves are refrigerated, and spray the ice cream with cooled (but not liquid) nitrogen for optimal temperature control
