Perfectly clear ice balls12/17/2023 ![]() ![]() I was writing that a little hastily, I suppose. Has anyone tried something similar before? What was your setup like? What kind of results did you get? I really hope this yields at least some positive results, since the setup was quite straightforward, and not nearly as finicky/precarious as what I had just tried. Then to insulate all the other sides of the sphere, I surround the mold with crumpled dish towels, hoping to minimize heat transfer via air. I have a heavy (8 qt?) stainless pot with some kind of sandwiched bottom that I will use like a large cold plate to conduct heat away from my ice mold right through the bottom. Thinking about the premise of this directional method a bit more, I came up with a variant to the method that I just set going in the freezer. I can think of three possible contributing factors to this: (1) I was using water from the tap, so it probably was a bit gassy to start with, (2) the existence of the trapped air bubble somehow prevented the gas from getting forced downward, and (3) the fill hole in the mold is *very* small, so it may be difficult for the gas to get pushed out of it even under ideal conditions. Also, there ended up being a moderate bubble (~0.5 cc, maybe?) at the very top of the mold. ![]() Opaque all throughout, but there did happen to be larger bubbles on the fill hole side, so that is promising. I've tried the basic technique outlined in this blog post, but it sadly did not work well. It's incredibly sexy, and it would be even more sexy if it came out crystal clear! Hi all! I just got the new D20 ice mold from ThinkGeek ( ). And at the end, you'd have a bunch of ice balls plus a slab of clear ice with which to make cubes.īelon also included a way he likes to drink absinthe using an ice ball. Now that's a sexy ice ball! Thanks for sharing Craig!įor those of you who want to freeze more than one ball at a time, I'm guessing you could simply make multiple loops in the wire to hold multiple ice balls, but suspend it over a cooler (as in the Cooler Method) instead, as that is all freezing from the top-down. So with the hole in the ice ball mold facing the bottom of the pot, as the water in the mold turns to ice and expands, it pushes out the extra air-filled water out the hole into the pot below. ![]() Using this pot the water will freeze from the outside-in, but the big pot creates a big heat sink so the top will be clear until after the ice ball is fully frozen. In the Cooler Method I force that to be top-down. In a typical ice cube, that's outside-in, with the cloudy part in the center. That's the whole trick.Īs I figured out during all the ice experiments, the water freezes directionally from the coldest place to the warmest and the first parts to freeze are perfectly clear whereas the last area to freeze is cloudy from trapped air, impurities, and pressure cracks. The water should stay inside the ice mold rather than running down into the pot. As you pull the mold up out of the water to set it on the wire. Feel free to fill the ice ball with distilled or filtered water for better taste.ĭunk the filled ice ball mold into the pot of water with the hole FACING DOWN. Fill the pot with water just up to the wire. Over a pot of water (or better yet, a cooler as that will produce lots of clear ice) make a wire loop that the ice ball mold will sit on.ģ. Get yourself a silicone ice ball tray like this one that comes in a pack of six.Ģ. Artwork by Craig Belon, as are all photos in this post except the next one.ġ.
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