For water to freeze, it should first be super-chilled — that’s, chilled under 32 levels Fahrenheit. Solely then does it bear a section change from liquid to strong: Its construction transforms from a loosely sure mass of flowing molecules into crystalline aggregates with a strict, common alignment. These combination crystals in frozen meals can fluctuate in dimension, from microscopic and clean on the palate to plainly seen with a grainy texture (the velvety texture of well-churned ice cream in comparison with the sharp shards of a granita, for instance).

What determines the scale of these crystals?

I like to consider water as a room scattered with Tinkertoys and strong ice because the buildings my daughter’s first-grade classmates would possibly erect out of them. In the event you ask them to place items collectively as quick as they will, little or no collaboration will happen. Your room will find yourself stuffed with many small buildings. If, however, you give them extra time, they could begin haphazardly, constructing a number of small initiatives right here and there, however ultimately the attract of extra-large towers may have them working collectively, cannibalizing the smaller buildings so as to add to the larger ones. You wind up with fewer, bigger buildings.

So it’s with ice formation. Ice crystals, like toy skyscrapers, take time to construct. And identical to these toy skyscrapers, the speed at which they’re shaped makes an enormous distinction. As described in a Might 2020 article in Meals Engineering Opinions, a journal overlaying meals science and the meals business, when water freezes slowly, smaller ice crystals tend to spontaneously remelt in a course of often called recalescence, and merge into bigger crystals, which proceed to develop like amoebas, absorbing smaller, less-stable crystals.

Put merely, in terms of the scale of ice crystals, the longer it takes meals to freeze, the bigger the crystals can be. The bigger the ice crystals, the extra mobile harm they will trigger. The extra mobile harm brought on, the extra moisture will leak out throughout defrosting. And the extra liquid leaked out, the limper your thawed produce can be.

Thus, if limiting mobile harm is the purpose, then you definitely wish to freeze meals as shortly as attainable. In a business kitchen, one would possibly depend on extraordinarily chilly liquids like liquid nitrogen, or use blast chillers, freezers stored at 40 levels under zero or colder and outfitted with highly effective followers designed to quickly draw warmth away from meals. Like an air-fryer, however in reverse.