ice cubes
Ice cubes are small pieces of ice used to cool beverages. Ice cubes are produced at home by filling an ice cube tray with water and leaving it in a freezer. Some refrigerators are equipped with built in ice maker, which makes ice cubes & stores them in the small bin inside the freezer compartment from where they can be dispensed in the shape of ice cubes or crushed ice directly into your glass.
In commercial setting ice is usually produced in commercial ice machines, capable of large production and storage amounts. Ice from commercial ice machines are mostly cylindrical, and may have holes through the center and are completely clear without clouding found in the center of home made ice cubes. Clear ice comes from machine forming the ice cubes in very thin layers, instead of all freezing all the water at once. Cloudy ice cubes result from rapid water freezing. Oxygen gets trapped in fast freezing water producing cloudy ice cubes. When water is cooled slowly, oxygen & micro bubbles escape slowly from the water. Ice machines use a flowing water to make ice, making the bubbles to be forced away as the cube gets larger.
Drinks in US are served with ice “on the rocks”, in Europe they could be served with or without ice cubes. Restaurants and bars use ice cubes heavily to save alcohol, because having ice cubes in the glass hides the real amount of alcohol.
Ice cubes can also be crushed into flakes if faster cooling desired or to add some density to some multi colored cocktails.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
very interesting, I never knew that commercial ice machines are getting rid of foggy ice by constantly flowing water and removing air bubbles from the ice. Cool ! Thanks
very amazing post that you described in this blog for freezing the Ice by layer wise system. This enables us to take the choice how much chilled Ice We want to use….Thanks a lot to You!!!!!
This is really a very useful post for me………..