This Christmas, however, my sweetheart got me an amazing new nerdy science-of-cocktails book, Liquid Intelligence by Dave Arnold. There are some really fun and cool experiments you can do yourself, but I was immediately drawn to the section on ice. He writes that you can make clear ice cubes yourself at home with a cooler and a freezer. I'll admit, I was totally skeptical at first. In Morgenthaler's book, The Bar Book, the man himself says that he has tried this method and it didn't really work, which is why he buys ice commercially. I figured I had nothing to lose, so yesterday I set about making some clear ice myself. The worst part of this was cleaning our cooler, but I managed to scrub it out and I was on my way.
First off, put HOT (doesn't have to be boiling) water in a cooler without the lid on it. I used the old Coleman we already had and I would guess it holds like 2.5 gallons or so. I put about 4 inches of water in the cooler and put it in the deep freeze. Now, Arnold's instructions were sort of unclear at this point, but he says to put hot water in the cooler but to let it cool before putting it in the freezer because the hot water makes the other stuff in the freezer thaw a little and it messes with your food's textures. I didn't really understand that, so I put the water in there hot. I've got a new batch in the freezer now, and I let it cool down a lot before putting it in, so we'll see if that actually makes a difference. Now for the fun part--let it freeze. I left mine in for less than 24 hours because I was so anxious to try it out, but really 24-48 hours is probably best depending on the thickness of ice you want. After about 18 hours, my ice was approximately 1.5 inches thick. It was hard to see how much the water had frozen, but after I sloshed it around for a few minutes I was able to see how much had frozen. I decided the 1.5 inches was thick enough, so I took it out. I had a couple inches of water underneath the ice, and I knew I was going to spill it everywhere if I just dumped the ice out, so I used a screwdriver (I guess I'll be ordering an ice pick later) to make some small holes around the edges to let the water out, so I was able to dump it out in the sink.
After all the water was out, I put the cooler upside down on a towel and let the ice slide out.
Once the ice was out, I made sure it was a good temperature to work with. Arnold says the ice should look sort of wet rather than dry, because if it's too cold it will just shatter. When the ice first came out, it looked like this.
All that stuff on the top was just sort-of-frozen ice. I sliced it off and I was ready to go.
I used a serrated bread knife and a rolling pin to start making columns. I had no clue what to do here, so my end pieces ended up breaking in weird ways. The main thing I learned here was to not be afraid to use the knife to break the ice (ha, ha). I put the knife on the ice and then whacked it with the rolling pin to break these pieces into columns. After that, I did the same thing to the columns to make cubes. I ended up making maybe 15 or so "good" cubes that were about 2 x 1.5 inches. My most perfect cube was this one, which I am ridiculously proud of.
After I cut all the cubes, I placed them in a Rubbermaid container thing and put it in the freezer. It remains to be seen how they do after a few days storage.
I made an Old Fashioned to show off my work, and it was pretty darn beautiful (and tasty!).
Look at how clear that cube is! After trying this out for myself, I can officially say it works. Give it a try yourself and let me know how it goes in the comments.
