stories : Nagging Question
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Presto Chango!How does Magic Shell work? |
How does 
The tight-lipped folks at Smucker’s would like us to believe that Magic Shell—the topping that instantly hardens when it comes in contact with ice cream—is indeed magical. After a series of unreturned calls, a company rep emailed that information about the product, which comes in Caramel, Chocolate, Chocolate Fudge, Turtle Delight, and Twix flavors, is proprietary.
Hoping to extrapolate, CHOW called Mister Softee and Carvel to find out how their Magic Shell–like toppings work.
Mister Softee was the first to answer. President James Conway Jr. says his secret ingredient is “edible-grade paraffin wax.” The topping is kept warm before application, so the wax is in a melted state. When ice cream is dipped in it, the wax hardens. (It’s not that far-fetched: Paraffin wax is sometimes used in chocolate to give it a pretty sheen.)
But wax is not listed as an ingredient in Magic Shell.
Then Carvel—the ice cream chain that transforms its Fudgie the Whale cake into a Santa Claus cake for the holidays (simply by turning it 90 degrees)—gave us the scoop, so to speak.
Like Magic Shell, Carvel’s Brown Bonnet chocolate topping instantly forms a hard shell around ice cream. And, just like Magic Shell, one of the main ingredients is coconut oil.
Tropical oils, including coconut, are naturally high in saturated fat—consisting of about 90 percent of the stuff. As Paula Figoni explains in her book How Baking Works: Exploring the Fundamentals of Baking Science, “the more saturated fatty acids in fat, the more solid the fat. Tropical oils are all solid at room temperature but will melt quickly if the room is too warm.” Coconut oil becomes solid at 70 degrees, melts at about 74 degrees, and freezes at 25 degrees. To maintain the chocolate coating in a liquid state before application, Carvel keeps its Brown Bonnet in a warmer. Similarly, the label on Magic Shell warns against refrigeration and recommends running the bottle under hot water before use.
Karen Gailey, the public relations–corporate communications manager for Carvel, says it is the coconut oil’s reaction to Carvel soft-serve ice cream (22 degrees) that creates the “magic.”
I would love to make some homemade magic shell that didn't taste like, well, MagicShell (tm). Any ideas?
Plain chocolate?
My mom's chocolate sauce always hardens and I can guarantee there's no coconut oil in it. At most, there's butter, baking chocolate, and icing sugar. The proportions are probably key, but mostly I think it's the hot sauce coming in contact with cold ice cream and the chocolate hardening up.
Picco Pizzeria's soft serve ice cream with El Rey chocolate dip freezes perfectly to the ice cream and no chemicals. Well I doubt they would ever use them!
I would imagine if you melted any solid fat (lard, shortening, etc.) into chocolate it would raise the solidifying temperature. Might screw up the texture though.
Anybody wanna do some kitchen science and try to make Magic Shell with cocoa powder, sugar, oil, and bacon drippings? Mmm...Bacon Shell...
I usually melt high-quality dark chocolate in a double boiler and drizzle on top of ice cream with a spoon - i think b/c of the thin strands of chocolate, it hardens up just like magic shell (and although i'm tempted to say that it's tastier, I do have a soft spot in my heart for the magic stuff, so lets just say they each have their own charm)
"Bacon Shell" on top of avocado ice cream, with blue cheese crumble toppings. Scoobyhed, do it.
When I buy Belgian chocolates or any other kind for that matter, the chocolates are solid. When chocolate is chilled, it becomes harder and brittle with no assist from yukk-y coconut fats or any waxes. The industrial ice cream vandors use that gunk because it saves them money. If they could get away with floor wax, they probably would.
For a homemade, "natural" magic shell like product, heat about one ounce of dark chocolate with 1 - 1 1/2 tsp of peanut oil in the microwave at 50% power in a microwave safe, 4 oz. ramekin or other similarly shaped/sized container, just until the ingredients become soft/warm enouch to blend together with a fork. Stir until the oil is fully incorporated and let cool to room temp or about 72° F. Have your ice cream already scooped into a bowl and sitting in the freezer, so that the sauce sets up immediately uppn drizzling. Works for me, but then I kind of threw this together. You might have to play with the oil amount a little bit depending on your chocolate, but this should get you in the ballpark. The more oil you add, the softer the set-up and less intense the flavor.
One more thing, in the above "recipe," the chocolate should either be chopped or in chips prior to going into the ramekin. Using one solid piece will make this a much more difficult act of even melting, without overheating at least part of the chocolate.
I thought it had paraffin in it. Perhaps you could use a small amount of canning paraffin and see if that works.
So, do places like DQ and any other place that chocolate dips use Magic Shell, or do they have their own "secret sauces", too?
Hmmmm...........
About 40 years ago my mother used to take us to an ice cream shop that had "Gold Brick Sundaes". It was a caramel or butterscotch topping that hardened on the ice cream. This was way before. Magic Shell
I have no idea how it was done but boy did we love them.
I'm interested in how does Magic shell work? how does it know when its on ice cream? cause it knows, one time I conducted one of my many scientific experiments using a control group of a pretzel, Frutti Pebbles, a tennis shoe and a bowl of mashed potato's (used because when scooped using an ice cream scooper it bears an uncanny resemblance to Ice cream and I thought it would trick the Magic Shell) But all the above Items failed to produce a single shell. So this is scientific proof that Magic Shell knows when it is on ice cream and then makes itself into a shell. I will be conducting a future test where I will be pouring Magic Shell over a full color photograph of ice cream in hopes this will induce the shelling process to begin.