Search under way for low-cal ice cream that tastes good

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Here's a mouthful about how humans savor ice cream flavors, courtesy of Seo-Jing Chung, a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri:

"When you masticate food, essentially, flavor volatiles come out from the food matrix to the head space and it moves over to your nasal cavity."

Translation from 12-year-old Sterling Wyatt, licking a scoop of chocolate ice cream on a 96-degree day: "Heavy. Rich. Yummy. Mmmmmmmm!"

July is National Ice Cream Month, celebrating one of summer's simple pleasures.

But the way ice cream flavors are achieved is anything but simple.

A tiny adjustment in fat content or tweaking one of dozens of chemicals in flavor components can thrill or turn off an ice cream devotee.

An elusive goal

At the University of Missouri-Columbia, Chung, 27, and other researchers are trying to create a low-fat strawberry ice cream that tastes as satisfying as the full-fat version.

It's an elusive goal. But there is enough interest in finding answers that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has provided a $108,000 grant to finance two years of studies on the subject at Missouri, which through its dairy operations has a rich tradition in ice cream research.

That tradition reached a new level with the creation in 1987 of an endowment by ice cream researcher Wendell Arbuckle within Missouri's Department of Food Science and Nutrition.

In 1989, the school opened its own campus retail outlet nicknamed for Arbuckle, Buck's Ice Cream Place. All of the ice cream sold at Buck's is manufactured fresh on campus in a well-equipped kitchen that can crank out 30 gallons per hour.

"It's a classroom, it's a laboratory, it's a commercial ice cream plant," said Buck's manager, Rick Linhardt.

Fat carries the flavor

While Buck's hosts ice cream fans on hot summer days, upstairs in the school's research labs the recipes are manipulated over and over, in search of that elusive quality in low-fat ice cream -- the flavor of full-fat.

"Fat is the flavor carrier in ice cream, and it's hard to improve on that flavor," said Ingolf Gruen, a professor specializing in flavorings who oversees ice cream research at Missouri.

The challenge is evident in ice cream sales statistics. Sales of zero-fat ice cream were down 23 percent in 2000, the latest numbers available from the International Dairy Foods Association. Low-fat and reduced-fat ice cream sales declined 8 percent for the same period, while sales for full-fat ice cream were up more than 7 percent.

That cultural preference for full-fat taste motivates researchers like Chung, who has spent about two years dishing samples of ice cream into a glass device that imitates the workings of a human mouth.

She introduces an enzyme that mimics human saliva, while a magnet moves around a two-inch sliver of Teflon-coated metal, imitating movements of the tongue.

The flavors of each sample are forced out of the ice cream into the artificial mouth by infusions of nitrogen gas.

These microscopic bits rise until reaching an absorbent strip, which is removed for computer analysis.