Preparing the Perfect Pop

Remember hearing the music from the ice cream truck as it drove through your neighborhood? That memory instantly evokes nostalgia from your childhood. Maybe it was a hot summer day and you needed to cool off, or maybe you just needed a special treat. Either way, I bet you can taste that memory.

In today’s marketplace, frozen pops have become extremely popular due to their flavor variety, recipe development, and overall presentation. Now that we’re all grown up we can easily make our own frozen pops from scratch instead of relying on the daily delivery from the ice cream truck. With a few helpful hints you can master the frozen pop and create endless ideas to inspire new generations.

The first helpful hint for troubleshooting the production of frozen pops is making sure that your gelato, ice cream or sorbetto is soft enough to pipe into the frozen pop mold. When using items that have been in your display case for a few days, make sure to soften them in a mixer before attempting to pipe into the mold or else you might end up with unevenly piped frozen pops and air bubbles, leaving an undesired design. If you’re extracting the product and immediately piping into the mold, you will have fewer issues with getting the product into all of the crevices of the molds because the product will be much softer and easy to pipe.

We always recommend that you use a small off-set spatula to level the product in the mold, but before doing this, here is another helpful hint. Make sure to insert the frozen pop stick into the mold after you pipe the frozen product and before you level off the top of the mold. We suggest this method because if you level off the mold before inserting the wooden frozen pop stick, you could damage the evenly-leveled bottom of the frozen dessert you just created.

Another helpful hint for troubleshooting the production of frozen pops is to make sure you don’t dip the finished pop directly from the blast freezer. When applying a delicious coating on the frozen pops – perhaps a crunchy chocolate coating or a drizzle of strawberry coating – it is imperative that frozen pops be tempered before they are dipped into a warm coating bath. The reason for this is because if the pop were to be dipped at a temperature of -23°F/-30°C into a bath of warm coating at a temperature of above 90°F/32°C, this could cause a thermal shock and possibly crack the shell. To avoid this, after the pops have been blast frozen, allow them to temper in a standard freezer for at least 15-20 minutes before dipping.

With these helpful hints, and a few great products, you’ll be making perfect pops in no time.