This is what we are up against.Follow

Yes. And do you realize that the issue of freezing/melting has nothing to do with the story at hand? Apparently a "good part of the internet" wasn't smart enough to figure out that out. Which is what my comment was about.

Apparently a good part of the internet has figured out what makes ice cream ice cream. You'll catch up some day. Maybe.

Sure it does. He supposedly ate an entire batch of ice cream that was made with salt. You can't make ice cream with with any significant salt content since it won't freeze which is sort of central to the whole "ice cream" concept. I suppose he could have drank an entire quart of salty milk sludge with vanilla flavoring which would make him sound even stupider. Or, the story is fabricated.


Yeah, you don't "sacrifice" by eating ice cream. You choose to eat it or not eat it and, if it tastes like salty shit, the intelligent choice is "not eat it". It's not as though they were living in Anne Frank's attic and this was their only food for the week or something. The day I eat crappy ice cream and expect people to think I'm nobly "sacrificing" for my children, I hope a flight of angels spirit my kids away to a parent with a fucking clue.

You know how a sane person would handle that situation? By teaching their kids that sometimes you make a mistake and things don't work out but, given that it's nothing significant, you can just laugh it off, have a funny memory and move on with life rather than eating a quart of sad-cream.


Edited, Sep 28th 2012 9:30pm by Jophiel

The story says "Home made ice cream" which I would assume means it used one of those crank machines you put salty ice water into the outside and the milk into the center container and get to cranking. In fact, the point of the salt in the ice water is create enough cold that you can semi-freeze (non-salted) milk.

I would suspect that you'd either have a minimal enough salt in there that it would freeze but not significantly affect the taste (very possible; maybe Mormons don't add a full measure of sugar to their ice cream. Beats me) which sort of invalidates the point of the story or having enough salt to make its consumption a "sacrifice" would prohibit it from freezing.

I'm willing to admit that I could be wrong on it. Someone mail it in to Mythbusters. Or maybe some aspiring GOP'er will film themselves making salty ice cream and put it on YouTube. I think the "point" of the story is pretty dumb anyway so it's all the same to me. The key line is supposed to be that Mitt learned "waste will not be tolerated" but sometimes you're better off tolerating waste. Saying "No! We've spent this much, we MUST sacrifice further" is a terrible mindset to apply to every situation. That's the sort of thinking that blindly gives you "We must send 50,000 more men in so the deaths of the first 45,000 won't be in vain".

Edited, Sep 28th 2012 10:05pm by Jophiel

Alton Brown should get back on the Food Network and make a combination Good Eats/Mythbusters combo. Eats Busters?

I'm thinking even the electric machines would have trouble freezing a mixture with a salt for sugar replacement. If I remember Good Eats correctly, I think Alton's recipes called for like... 1/2 to 1 cup of sugar (or a even a little more)... That's a lot of salt for a couple cups of liquid.

I saw my grandfather make homemade ice cream a dozen times when I was a child, but I never knew exactly how the salt was used. Guess you learn something new every day.

Awww Gbaji has a new friend. Reminds me of when Varus was around.

Actually, I have a similar story to Mitt's fabricated one, only ours was a legit kid mistake. My best friend and I made peanut butter cookies from a recipe, but we read 1 tbsp of salt as "one cup of salt" and we ended up with the saltiest, nastiest cookies on the planet.

My mother took one bite and threw the whole batch out, then helped us make another.

Delicious even.

Sure. And my grandmother horded dried out rubber bands that would disintegrate into dust if used. They kept the same Styrofoam cup next to the kitchen tap for years. My grandfather famously unscrewed the light bulb in the refrigerator to save electricity. When my mother and aunt were younger, he would make "garbage stew" where he cleaned all the leftovers out of the fridge, threw them in a pot and boiled it into a single mass. He used to comb the alleyways in Chicago looking for discarded stuff to give to us ("Oh boy, a bag full of mismatched discarded mittens...") But he also had paper grocery bags full of cash he kept hidden in the house and used to walk to the bank near daily to check his account interest. Both lived through the Depression -- my grandfather was a bona fide boxcar riding hobo trying to get work from city to city back in the day.

The difference being that we recognized that as being extreme behaviors likely brought on by a very stressful event. They weren't lauded as "My grandparents kept a thousand worthless rubber bands because waste would not be tolerated; isn't that something wonderful to emulate?" It wasn't wonderful, it was a sickness and it's a shame that they were too afraid to spend any money to buy a seventy-five cent bag of rubber bands from the drug store.

[None of this has anything to do with Mitt Romney himself; I'm just talking Depression era mental pathology]

I think the pattern would be similar with anyone from that era, my 4 grand parents all have some quirks associated with scrimping and saving. It is just the way they were raised. Heck my Grandfather keeps all of his batteries in his freezer, my Grandmother literally sleeps on money. She refuses to use a bank other than cashing checks. My other Grandmother refuses to buy food she can grow herself, and that is just a tiny portion of the odd things.

I know I'm late to the party, but you guys should read up on how freezing point depression works.

Salt (NaCl) doesn't have, itself, some intrinsic anti-melting property. Any solute in a solution causes the freezing point of the solvent to decrease. NaCl is just the most commonly used because it's easily available and cheap. Putting sugar in water can also decrease it's freezing point.

It's important to note, however, that the magnitude of the depression is dependent on the molality (concentration) of solute the solution. NaCl, when dissolved, dissociates into Na+ and Cl- giving twice as much solute per NaCl molecule thereby doubling the depression effect, whereas sugar (most likely in this case sucrose: C12H22O11) does not dissociate.

FOR SCIENCE!