How Do I Make Clear Ice at Home? a Food Scientist Shares Easy Tips
janrinok writes:
https://phys.org/news/2025-12-ice-home-food-scientist-easy.html
When you splurge on a cocktail in a bar, the drink often comes with a slab of aesthetically pleasing, perfectly clear ice. The stuff looks much fancier than the slightly cloudy ice you get from your home freezer. How do they do this?
Clear ice is actually made from regular water-what's different is the freezing process.
With a little help from science, you can make clear ice at home, and it's not even that tricky. However, there are quite a few hacks on the internet that won't work. Let's dive into the physics and chemistry involved.
Homemade ice is often cloudy because it has a myriad of tiny bubbles and other impurities. In a typical ice cube tray, as freezing begins and ice starts to form inward from all directions, it traps whatever is floating in the water: mostly air bubbles, dissolved minerals and gases.
These get pushed toward the center of the ice as freezing progresses and end up caught in the middle of the cube with nowhere else to go.
That's why when making ice the usual way-just pouring water into a vessel and putting in the freezer-it will always end up looking somewhat cloudy. Light scatters as it hits the finished ice cube, colliding with the concentrated core of trapped gases and minerals. This creates the cloudy appearance.
As well as looking nice, clear ice is denser and melts slower because it doesn't have those bubbles and impurities. This also means that it dilutes drinks more slowly than regular, cloudy ice.
Because it doesn't have impurities, the clear ice should also be free from any inadvertent flavors that could contaminate your drink.
Additionally, because it's less likely to crumble, clear ice can be easily cut and formed into different shapes to further dress up your cocktail.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.