Spotlight on Bluebells ice cream

Transcript

00:00 I'm Oliver Brown, I'm one of the family here at Bluebells. I've lived here since I was a young

00:05 lad really. So yeah, the ice cream's all made from our own cow's milk here on the farm. So cows are

00:12 milked twice a day, we go out to grass every night and during the day and we'll bring them in. My

00:17 father will take them through, put them through the robot. So the robot milks them, looks after

00:23 them, checks their temperature, checks that they're all healthy and everything's okay, weighs them as

00:27 well. And then the milk goes from there up over the pipe across the top of the barn to the dairy.

00:34 So there's a big milk tank there and we take it from the dairy down to the ice cream parlor.

00:39 Usually we use milk within two days somewhere there, so it's always pretty fresh. Then in the

00:44 ice cream parlor we pasteurize it. So we add in the cream, sugar and emulsify, stabilize,

00:53 everything like that. Everything you need for ice cream to make it thick and creamy and delicious

00:57 to pasteurize it up to 85 degrees C and cool it down. And that process takes about two hours for

01:02 that 600 litre batch. So from there we then age it overnight because with ice cream you can't just

01:08 leave it to sit, you can't just use it straight away, you need to let it age to let the fats

01:13 basically form back up again. You get a much smoother taste that way than if you just use it

01:18 straight off. So the aging process is really important and that can take at least six hours,

01:23 but we always leave it overnight in the aging vats. And then in the aging vats we add the

01:28 different flavours to it, so everything from strawberry, chocolate's my favourite because

01:32 you're adding literally buckets loads of chocolate and cocoa powder and mix all that up. It's a bit

01:36 like a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory kind of affair, smells great. And then you've got a big

01:44 vat of flavoured mix which you then need to freeze down. So that goes to our continuous freezer which

01:50 is a bit like a really big version of a Mr Weekend machine, but much better. So it goes in one end as

01:57 liquid and comes out the other end as frozen, a long solid tube which continues going. And we

02:02 control everything from the amount of air going in, so ours is a low overrun product, so we,

02:08 you know, the smallest amount of air possible to give us a really dense, intense flavour and lovely

02:14 mouthfeel to it. And then as it's coming out we add in ripples and we add in inclusions such as

02:21 chocolates, ripples like caramel or strawberry or whatever else we're putting into it,

02:26 on that day cherries. And then we pot up from there and into the freezers. So yeah,

02:31 once it starts though you can't stop, you've got to keep it running non-stop. So yeah, I think that's

02:38 the beauty of this. I mean, ours is an artisan product so it varies with the milk, so our milk

03:02 varies with the seasons. So when we put our cows out to grass in the summer, because we can't keep

03:07 them in over at a comp for 10 out of the winter, we get that sort of spring flush of milk and I

03:11 think that's always the best sort of time. And it varies, so each time of year it'll be slightly

03:16 different because of that. And yeah, I think that whole process, as my mum calls it, from cow to

03:21 comb is really important, that's a really crucial part of it, because we can tweak everything. So

03:26 if we won't like a certain part we can control that and we can change it and make it even better.

03:31 And we're continuously improving so that we don't use the same recipe we used when we started 15

03:37 years ago now. It has changed and tweaked every single year we've done it, so we're always trying

03:42 to make improvements, little bits all the time.