There are very few things in this world we can all agree on, but one that’s relatively safe is the mutual love we all have for soft serve ice cream. Unless you’re part of the few who don’t enjoy the flavours of a crisp cold soft serve, it’s safe to say they almost always hit the spot for your sweet-tooth fix.
If you’re in the minority because you’re yet to enjoy a nice soft serve, chances are it could be the cleanliness of the machine. Luckily for you, we may have a solution up our sleeves:
What are you cleaning?
Let’s start by looking at the nature of the product to better understand what you’re cleaning. What does a soft serve machine do? It works by freezing liquid ice cream under agitation and dispensing the product from the freezer onto a cup or cone. The ice cream itself is made up of a combination of calcium, milk protein, minerals, and fats. If these food-based components are in the machine’s system for a long time, that’s where you start seeing significant changes in the quality of the product. 🍦
How does this effect the taste of your soft serve? The link between machine performance and residue build up is as a very toxic relationship. The more that the machine build up thrives, the more this impedes the machine’s performance. This directly impacts the quality of the ice cream as it may slow down or reduce the ability to keep the ice cream of correct consistency. Before you know it, you’ll be having a very unsavoury soft serve!
What’s the best way remove proteins? Three magic words: Alkaline cleaning fluid. This helps to disperse the proteins within the milk line for easy removal and controls hard water scale to give you a full clean.
Chill your soft serve machine
We’ve got a product that works specifically for cleaning and removing water scale from cold food and beverage machines by the name of Cafetto Chill. With its powdered chlorine, this product helps sanitise and bleach any coloured organics by reducing sugars for a hygienic machine.
Colour coded cleanliness
Chill contains a specific blend of dye compounds that are sensitive to food components. Red, yellow & orange indicate not clean as there are several sugars in the systems that react with the specialised colour indicator. If you see red: this indicates a VERY dirty machine that is screaming out for more attention to cleaning! Ideally, you should see a solution that comes out the machine as dark pink after 2 minutes, this will indicate an effective cleaning cycle (see below figure).
How does Cafetto Chill actually work?
Run Chill through the soft serve machine at 8 grams of powder per litre and pump it through the machine to all contact points where milk residue is present (if you end up with a yellow, orange or red colour, this indicates that another cleaning cycle should be undertaken). Machine disassembly may be required depending on the machine type. As always please refer to your manufacturer’s instructions for cleaning. Once complete, rinse thoroughly by running another cleaning cycle with fresh water.
Once your machine is clean as a whistle, we challenge you to make a soft serve for someone who claims they ‘don’t like soft serves’ and see if a freshly cleaned machine makes the difference. 😉
Isn't it time you treated your soft serve machine to some Cafetto Chill?