By Chandhana Sathishkumar
In middle school, I decided to spend my life's net worth in saved-up coins. The plan pretty much carried itself out when a thallu vandi labelled 'Arun' in bright red letters began showing up at my school gate. For many months I bought ice cream after school almost every day, often enough to even have an open tab with the Arun anna. It always went the same way. I hand him a combination of coins totaling ₹10, a vanilla cup peels open and, by the third spoonful, the surface catches a sheen as the sun takes over. By the sixth, a rivulet escapes the rim, and then there is no going back.
There is something really inconvenient about how quickly ice cream melts in the Indian summer. Not because melting is surprising. Of course it melts. The disappointment is how little time it takes to give up. The product sold today feels like it was never designed for the place it lives in.
Ice cream here moves through heat, only briefly interrupted by refrigeration. Consider the journey of an ice cream tub. It leaves the factory in a refrigerated truck to reach the distributor, from where it goes to a petti kada freezer or a street vendor’s cart, eventually to reach the customer’s home on a bike ride. Each step offers an opportunity for heat to creep in. Repeated cycles degrade its quality even if the product remains frozen.
Ice Cream as a Material
Counter to its name, ice cream isn’t just frozen cream. It’s a multi-phase material held together just long enough. The texture depends on the size and arrangement of these phases.
The first thing holding ice cream together is ice itself, which shares the same lattice structure as regular ice called Ice I. For ice cream to feel smooth, these crystals need to stay under about fifty microns, roughly half the thickness of a sheet of paper. When ice cream melts and refreezes, water molecules deposit onto existing crystals. You might have experienced this as a grainy tasting ice cream.
The second phase doesn’t freeze at all. It is a concentrated sugar solution that stays liquid even below zero. Sugars are excluded from the growing ice and concentrate in the serum, forcing water molecules to reorganize around it rather than lock into place. Without this unfrozen layer, ice cream would freeze into a solid block. The syrup keeps ice cream scoopable.
Find answers in the complete article:
Alter Magazine's Issue #5 is the story of what it would take to build an ice cream designed for the Indian summer, from the material science of ice crystals and fat networks, to global solutions like Turkish dondurma and a Ladakhi monastery's soft-serve setup, to Unilever's 2023 patent release. This is a portrait of pleasure engineered for heat.
We hosted the launch of Issue #5 at Art of Delight, Residency Road, Bangalore, and simultaneously in San Francisco. The Bangalore evening opened with The Great Ice Cream Quiz and closed with a liquid nitrogen demonstration by our Chief Scientist, Dr. Sambuddha Misra, unveiling three flavours specially made by Art of Delight for the occasion: matcha tea, Thai tea, and Dorje lemon honey tea. Chandhana Sathishkumar, the writer behind Issue #5, joined the San Francisco conversation on what it takes to build pleasure for a billion people who live in the heat.
Alter Magazine@AlterMagIndia
An ice cream is a surprisingly elaborate piece of chemistry and physics. Contrary to its name, it isn't just frozen cream. It's four separate things held together at once: • ice crystals • a sugar syrup that never freezes • air folded in by churning, and • a network of fat
5:34 AM · Jun 26, 2026 · 46.2K Views
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Alter Magazine hosts a launch event for every new issue, an evening where the ideas on the page find a room to breathe. Subscribe to our Luma to stay up to date with the latest.
Issue 5: Designing a Summer Ice Cream for India, written by Chandhana Sathishkumar, edited by Fahad Hasin, scooped, churned & built by Alt Carbon.
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