What Emulsifiers Do

• Although emulsifiers can be described honestly as "artificial additives," their role in a frozen dessert is pretty essential. Even a purist's homemade ice cream contains emulsifiers, in the form of egg yolks. Emulsifiers help the other ingredients mix smoothly and stay mixed, a crucial characteristic in frozen or baked desserts and many other preparations. They act as matchmakers at the molecular level, helping form atomic bonds between liquids, fats and other dissimilar substances. That provides dessert-makers with a number of benefits.

Ease of Mixing

• If you choose to bake a cake from scratch, you might spend several minutes creaming and mixing the batter to achieve the correct consistency. Yet a boxed cake mix takes only 2 1/2 minutes, blending its ingredients almost immediately. That's because the boxed mix contains additional emulsifiers. The same holds true with frozen desserts. Most include varying quantities of fruit juice, cream, eggs, sugar, gums, stabilizers, antioxidants and a range of other ingredients. Emulsifiers help those ingredients combine quickly and easily, making the mixing process more efficient.

Texture

• With frozen desserts, a soft and smooth texture is the end result you're looking for. When a cake batter is perfectly mixed, it produces a cake with a soft, perfectly consistent crumb. In the same way, a perfectly mixed frozen dessert has a smooth, even consistency regardless of its ingredients. That's the work of emulsifiers in the dessert. Ice cream and its kin are relatively smooth to begin with, because of the rich cream, but emulsifiers can give the same rich smoothness to fruit-based and juice-based treats.

Mouthfeel

• Mouthfeel is closely related to texture, but it isn't exactly the same thing. It's a broader term, including perceptions of richness, smoothness, flavor and aroma as well as texture. Aroma plays only a small role in frozen desserts, because cold temperatures limit the release of aromatic molecules. However, emulsifiers in frozen desserts contribute greatly to the remaining elements of mouthfeel. By helping the flavorings and other ingredients combine gracefully, emulsifiers prevent the uneven or inconsistent flavors and textures that result from incomplete mixing.