One of the best ways to use liquid nitrogen is to make ice cream. If you have ready access to liquid nitrogen (you're in college, perhaps) then making ice cream is almost easier than buying it, and much more enjoyable.

Here is one recipe:

You'll also need a large plastic bowl (tupperware works well too) and a wooden spoon.

Mix the liquid ingredients together, then add the sugar and stir until it dissolves. Add the flavorings.

Now, add the liquid nitrogen in small amounts (approximately 250 ml at a time) and stir until the nitrogen has boiled completely away. Repeat until the ice cream is frozen.

I've made ice cream this way twice, and I have some additional advice. If you use chocolate, make sure that it is grated into very small pieces, because large chunks will be frozen too hard to eat. If you make butter pecan ice cream, drain the excess butter after sauteing (or stir very well), because otherwise it will separate into hard chunks of frozen greasy salty butter.

mmm hmm, delicious!

you can also order a dewar full of liquid nitrogen from your local gas company. they deliver, although they usually require a deposit on the dewar. the best thing is that by the gallon, the LN2 is cheaper than milk! at about $0.89/gallon, you could get enough LN2 to make enough ice cream for a small army and still have enough to cool off your house, make huge water-vapor clouds, freeze everything you can see (including roses, basketballs, and anything else you might want to shatter into a million pieces), and then fill up some 2-liter bottles and watch them explode (dangerous! loud!)

My final year project at University was on creating cool ways of demonstrating physical phenomena for use with school classes, and making li-ni ice cream was one of the more popular with the group of forty or so kids we brought up to the Laboratory to test our ideas on (can we say "guinea pig"?).

It's ironic that it's probably the only ice cream manufacturing technique where you actually have to warm up the ice cream before you can eat it!

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