liquid nitrogen and nothing else by Joy X. '29
🧄
About a year ago, Ellie posted a blog about what I thought would be my (first and) last year of Mathcamp01 Canada/USA Mathcamp! It’s a math program for high school students (including falling seniors, which was what I applied as) to learn higher maths. It’s super fun! I highly encourage anyone reading this who is a fan of math to apply >:) . In hindsight, it’s no surprise that I applied to return as a JC a few months later.Â
And when my offer popped up in my inbox, I thought perhaps the universe had the same sense of humor as me, because suddenly an idea for the greatest parody blog just popped into existence.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like my ancestors before me, this year at Mathcamp, I was a LN2JC–a title I particularly like, because it looks like a 2-factor authentication code. The LN2 stands for Liquid Nitrogen gas (N^2), with which we made liquid nitrogen ice cream. Making liquid nitrogen ice cream is a long standing Mathcamp tradition that happens every week during Academic Advisor meetings.Â
The JC stands for… JC. I made the mistake of thinking it stands for “Junior Counselor” once before, but it turns out that JC doesn’t actually stand for anything. Perhaps this year it stands for Juggling Clown, or Jolly Capper. I won’t elaborate in this blog, because as the title suggests, I can’t write about anything other than liquid nitrogen.Â
~~~~~~Week -5~~~~~~~
In June, I learned how to get quotes from liquid nitrogen companies, and read up on liquid nitrogen safety. After realizing that sometimes you needed to call companies (scary! I was actually petrified of talking to real people on the phone before becoming a JC) when they ghost your emails, my co-LN2JC, Keti, and I settled on a welding place that sold liquid nitrogen. They had the best (worst?) address imaginable: 67 Chad Ln.Â
~~~~~~Week 0~~~~~~~
We passed through the trials of obtaining liquid nitrogen in the first place (we brought the dewar–the insulated container–in a car and hugged it on the way there and back) and learning to pronounce dewar (apparently it is not de-war, but dew-ar). Liquid nitrogen is extremely cool; both literally and in the other sense.Â
Woahhh mist…
The first flavor we made was perhaps the most classic ice cream flavor of them all: cement.
…just kidding, we were trying to make chocolate ice cream, but we accidentally put wet cement into it. Just kidding (again). We wanted to make Blue Chocolate for whatever reason, but forgot that blue and brown make grey apparently. The chocolate flavor was Keti’s idea, and the cement coloring was mine. You’ll see this theme pop up many times throughout this blog!
I unfortunately don’t have a picture of this, but I think if I insert a picture of wet cement it will be indistinguishable. Rating: 4/5
The other flavors were not as cursed–we had Canada Flavor (maple syrup), Purple Flavor (frozen berries + orange extract—this was the flavor that most people liked the best; it turned out that berries and orange is a pretty good food combination!), and Piña Colada (the vegan flavor, which we turned green with food coloring). I unfortunately don’t have a picture of the Canada Flavor (or should I say FlavoUr), but Ellie made the same flavor exactly one year ago, so I’ll let you go look at that :)
~~~~~Week 1~~~~~
For the end-of-first-week LN2, we had a theme—Cookie and Carrot Fairy! At Mathcamp, we have a tradition where during every day during TAU–which stands for Time, Academic, Unscheduled, a dedicated time for campers to work on homework for their classes and ask instructors–two JCs go around asking campers if they want cookies or carrots (or neither) to snack on while they work on math. We have a lot of fun with this! Every day is a different theme—the three times I did it so far, we’ve been jesters, video game characters (I had made a Hollow Knight hat and a Among Us hat for this occasion, specifically), and Fireboy and Watergirl from the hit 2009 flash game Fireboy and Watergirl.Â
It’s one of the more recognizable traditions at Mathcamp, and so we decided to base our liquid nitrogen ice cream flavors around it. Our first flavor was Fairyland, our vegan flavor with an oat milk base, dragonfruit, strawberry, and mango. It was basically a breakfast fruit mix, but cold–which I liked, because it was essentially the first meal of the day for me (we typically do liquid nitrogen during Academic Advisor meetings, which are 10am-12pm this year. My sleep schedule was not a big fan of this :().
So vibrantly pink! I’m not sure if it was due to food coloring or the natural color of the dragonfruit. In any case, it tasted amazing. Rating: 5/5
The next flavor was Fairy, where we threw together heavy cream, sour candy, twizzlers, jello, and marshmallows. It was an okay flavor; in my opinion, the twizzlers were too crunchy when frozen.Â
No live fairies were harmed in the making of this flavor. Rating: 5/5
The third flavor was Cookie fairy, which was a bunch of crushed oreos mixed with mini marshmallows and chocolate syrup. It was a classic cookie and creme flavor.Â
Cookie! Rating: 3.5/5
Then was Grass, which, despite my propensity for eating grass (see Cooked Cooking) was not actually grass, but rather Mint Chocolate. I could not in my good conscience feed grass from the ground to campers (maybe grass from the store though…).Â
The last flavor was the flavor that I was most excited for–carrot (or maybe more accurately, carrot cake–we also added in cinnamon)! We spent the two hours before our ice cream preparing ingredients, which included grating an entire bag of carrots. It was a controversial flavor. This was our fifth flavor, and we usually do four flavors, and so many people were already tired of ice cream. It was also right before lunch, so maybe not the healthiest time for ice cream. However, one of our Mentors told me that it was her favorite flavor :)
So orange… Rating: 4/5
~~~Week 1.5~~~~~~~
Between week 1 and week 2, we still had a significant amount of liquid nitrogen remaining, so we (well, mostly me–Keti was not very excited about spicy ice cream or pickled ice cream) decided to run a Cursed LN2 Ice Cream event.
The sign for our event! I was really excited about “bees” as a flavor and was searching all over the internet for those fried bees that you sometimes see people selling on the street in certain places. But alas, I could not find any available in Burlington, Vermont (where Mathcamp was located this year).
Two days before the event, I went to the Hannaford’s with not much of a plan except to pick up things that sounded horrible as ice creams. These included things like pickles, goldfish (which was apparently a decent flavor in a past Mathcamp year, so I guess I don’t only have terrible ideas in my head), and mayonnaise. Then, on Tuesday evening, we lugged the 20L dewar of liquid nitrogen down the hill, and commenced the fun. The flavors were as follows:
One: Chocolate Chip. This flavor was by far the least cursed. “But wait!” you say. “Chocolate Chip is a normal flavor of ice cream!” and that is partially true. It was not cursed by taste, but rather cursed because the name held true: it had a normal whipped cream base, but only one chocolate chip in it. We had bought a bag of chocolate chips for use in a previous LN2 session, but it had completely melted from being in the sun for two hours. We refroze the bag, but the chocolate chips had by then merged into one singular big chocolate chip.Â
Two: Sesame.Â
A very delicious sesame flavor. Rating: 3/5
“But wait,” you say again. “That’s still a normal flavor!” and that would be true, except for the fact that I lied. This was not in fact sesame, but rather black pepper.Â
Three: Pickles. Keti captured this amazing photo of me pouring pickles into unsuspecting ice cream.Â
Surprisingly, the pickles ice cream was pretty good, according to most of the people who tried it. We had forgotten to add sugar, which was actually a pretty good outcome—it brought out the tangy flavor of the pickle juice.Â
Four: Ketchup. Not many comments here. It just tasted like cold ketchup. I would say that the ketchup made for an especially creamy ice cream, that would inspire a later (non-cursed) ice cream flavor >:) However, according to Keti, this ice cream was especially “eerie” and felt like “eating ketchup with a smooth yogurt consistency” (I’d argue ketchup already has a yogurt-like consistency? but who am I to say…)
Five: Buffalo hot sauce.Â
It even looks spicy…
Rating: 3/5
So my spice tolerance is super low, and I hate spicy stuff, but this flavor was actually not bad. I only put in around half of the bottle at first, but could barely taste the spice, so I ended up dumping the entire bottle in. I also put in some crushed hot cheetos, which were left over from a previous event that some campers ran: Cursed Oreos (see, I’m not the only one who likes cursed food >:)). They had hot cheeto, wasabi, hot honey, and garlic flavor!
The wasabi looks temptingly like mint…
Garlic was actually a big part of Mathcamp this year. At the beginning of camp, we bought a lot of garlic for some reason, and so some campers decided to devise a way to use it up. Naturally, the method of using up garlic was a garlic eating competition. In the next four weeks, garlic became a big enough thing that campers made garlic butter, garlic and banana pizza, and played garlic chess 02 Garlic Chess is a variant of chess in which garlic replaces the chess pieces, and you must eat the opponent’s piece after capturing it .Â
Ironically, this meant we had to buy more garlic many times. We were also planning to make garlic ice cream, but unfortunately it never happened. However, I actually had garlic ice cream two weeks prior to Mathcamp, in Gilroy, California, the garlic capital of the world.Â
My thoughts on Garlic Ice cream: bad at first, but after a while the garlic flavor fades into an aftertaste and it gets better.
Six: Cool Beans. So you’ve most likely realized that I haven’t had complaints about my previous cursed creations, but I will say that this one was genuinely bad, which should concern you.Â
It was bad partly because it was extremely salty. I had, because of course I am allergic to ideas that would make for good ice cream, bought canned baked beans instead of something normal, say, red beans. It was also bad because we didn’t clean the bowl between flavors, and so this flavor had not only salty beans, but also chunks of pickles, traces of black pepper, a spicy overtone, and an aftertaste of ketchup.
Oh, and to make things worse, we poured too much liquid nitrogen in it, so it was also rock hard. I had eaten a full small paper cup of all the flavors, but this one was so bad that I could not choke down even half a cup.Â
We called it cool beans, and I was inspired by one of the other JCs, Bo, who had told us about a catchphrase that he invented, “beans” (not even “cool beans”. no, something cool happens and he’d just be like. “beans”). While writing this blog, I asked Bo if he’d tried the bean ice cream to get his thoughts on it, and he reported that I had handed him a cup and he had looked concerningly at it. Which, to be fair, is a very reasonable reaction, especially if the ice cream looks like this:
~~~~~Week 2~~~~~
Our flavors this week were:
For our vegan flavor, a sprite slushie, mixed with some grenadine syrup (Keti’s idea! You can probably guess, because it was a good idea.). The syrup was a good choice–it lent the sprite a very sweet flavor.
I was secretly hoping that the slushie was going to be slightly fizzy still, but it wasn’t. Rating: 4/5
The second flavor was the one I was most excited for. If you have read this blog up to here, you will realize that this is a bad sign. The flavor was honey crunch, which sounds normal…except for the base:
Mayonnaise.
Mayonnaise! I got this idea because of the ketchup flavor during the Cursed LN2 event–the ketchup had a really nice texture, so I was thinking of other condiments that I make ice cream with. I had heard about mayonnaise being used in baking (mayonnaise cakes are apparently a thing, since mayonnaise is just eggs and oil), so I decided to see if I could pull off a mayonnaise ice cream.Â
When I first poured in the mayonnaise and tasted it, I immediately regretted my decisions. Then I poured in condensed milk, sugar, and heavy cream, and decided I regretted my decision less. After adding in honey, Nilla wafers, and liquid nitrogen, I had fully unregretted my decision.
However, I did hear that people who ate the concoction after it had melted had less of a good time; apparently without the coldness you could taste the mayonnaise fully.Â
The next flavor was lemon, of which I only remembered to take a picture after it was almost entirely eaten.Â
The last flavor for the day was Apple, for which we cut up a lot of apples, poured in applesauce, and added honey, Nilla wafers, and cinnamon to top it off. This was also an incredibly good flavor that I seem to not have a photo of :( The fresh apples were very crisp and the ice cream had a very refreshing flavor.Â
~~~~~~Week 3~~~~~
Unfortunately, LN2 was cancelled because of rain :(Â However, we did a makeup LN2 the next Monday, where we had:
~~~Week 4~~~
For our second to last week, we had the following flavors:
Cherry! This was our vegan flavor, and was basically just fresh cherries plus oat milk plus liquid nitrogen. It was very good; completely worth the two hours I spent the prior evening pitting cherries.Â
Cherry oat milk! The fresh cherries in it paired very well with the oat milk. Rating: 5/5
Mango! This one consisted of heavy cream, half and half, mango extract, and fresh mangos. Except the fresh mangos were also very unripe mangos, and so were very stringy–we tried to cut one, and then gave up.Â
The mango extract (which I didn’t know existed before) was very good at doing its job and making things taste like mango. Rating: 5/5
Next up was Sugar Cone, which was originally supposed to be Caramel Cone, but we didn’t have time to make caramel. Since we had lots of honey left over from last week’s honey flavor, we drizzled honey into a cream base and added some sugar cones! Usually we serve ice cream in mini paper cups, but for this flavor we offered a cone option (though it doesn’t work as well for liquid nitrogen ice cream as it does for normal ice cream–LN2 ice cream melts extremely fast, so often you’d be left with just a puddle in a cone, which doesn’t look as aesthetic).
Crushing up the cones in the bowl was extremely satisfying. Rating: 5/5.
All of our flavors this week so far were really good, which is how you know that none of the ideas were mine. In exchange for the good flavors, I was allowed to make two experimental flavors.
The first experimental flavor was Avocado, which we made using fresh avocados (mashed up), condensed milk, cream base, and a spritz of lemon. Keti also had the idea of buying tortilla chips to give to people in lieu of spoons, which was the most brilliant idea ever.Â
The ice cream itself shattered my expectations–it was actually really good. The avocado gave the ice cream a lot of creaminess, but didn’t taste weird at all because of the condensed milk we added. Condensed milk is actually such a magic ingredient–it has turned all the cursed flavors we’ve done so far into pretty good flavors. I do kind of wish we had discovered it earlier; it’s a really good substitute for sugar.Â
Tortilla chip dipped in avocado ice cream :) the sweet and salty flavors balance out quite well, surprisingly. Rating: 5/5
Our last experimental flavor was supposed to be French Onion Soup Ingredients, but we (un?)fortunately ran out of liquid nitrogen right before, so we could not actually make it. I was mildly disappointed; I had stayed up from 7pm to 1am the previous night attempting to make French Onion Soup . It should not have taken 6 hours. It took 6 hours because I, being a certified Seasoning Hater™ when I cook normally, had not realized that salt was required and not just optional for the onions to caramelize–so they never did (that’s why we were going to call it “French Onion Soup Ingredients” instead of “French Onion Soup”, because it was never actually French Onion Soup :().
The uncaramelized onion soup. Still pretty good, even though it wasn’t frozen in the form of ice cream! Rating: 4/5
~~~Week 5~~~
We did our last LN2 making during Campus Beach Day, a field trip that happened because the weather forecast lied to us. We were originally going to have a real beach day at a real beach, but the weather forecast said it would rain, so it was instead cancelled, and backup field trips to watch Mean Girls at a local cinema and play laser tag were hastily organized. However, when the day came, there was not a cloud in the sky. In fact, it was the best possible weather it could have been for a Beach Day. Since it was then too late to reorganize a Beach Day field trip to a real beach, Beach Day became instead Campus Beach Day, where the lake was replaced with kiddie pools, and the ice cream truck was replaced with liquid nitrogen ice cream.
This week’s flavors were very fruity and summery (because I guess I was in the mood for fruit when we went grocery shopping the hour before).Â
Flavor 1: Pear! We got canned pears, put them in the food processor, and then poured liquid nitrogen on it. It turned out just what you’d expect frozen canned pear to taste like; we didn’t add any cream base to it.
I didn’t get a good photo of it before it was all eaten… Rating: 4/5
Flavor 2: Lumpy. At the beginning of camp, a petition was signed to make “Lumpy the Lizard”, a green lizard, the official mascot of camp. He was the mascot for a happy 4.5 weeks, that is, before we ate him. Just kidding! This was actually kiwi flavor. We got a bunch of kiwis and tried to cut them, but quickly discovered that they were quite unripe and hard to cut. Fortunately, the food processor came in handy. The result was this spectacularly lumpy flavor:Â
Even though this one had cream base to dilute it, it was still very sour (but a good kind of sour!). Rating: 4.5/5
Flavor 3: Coffee Caramel. Our last flavor this week (and last one for all of camp, even though we didn’t know it then) was made using caramel sauce, instant coffee powder, and a cream base:
I usually don’t like coffee…but this flavor made me change my opinion on it. Rating: 5/5.
After all the campers have had ice cream, there’s usually some melted ice cream left in the bowl. We have a tradition where one of us would pour the remnants of the ice cream straight from the bowl into the other’s mouth. I don’t think I ever had this done to me, partly because my appetite is so done with ice cream by the time that we finish, and partly because of reasons that you will see >:) So, the unlucky victim, uh, I mean recipient of the melted coffee ice cream was Keti.Â
In my defense, I was pouring straight and it was the liquid that veered off course at the last moment (you know, you can never trust the direction of gravity).Â
Ellie’s blog had a really heartfelt conclusion about her feelings of Mathcamp that I on the whole mostly share–but as per my own rules, I’m not allowed to write anything that’s not related to liquid nitrogen in this blog (…maybe in a future blog >:)) So I’ll say this: for me, Mathcamp is like Liquid Nitrogen. It’s pretty cool!
A roiling fog covers the ground… Rating: 3/5. Doesn’t really taste like anything.
- Canada/USA Mathcamp! It’s a math program for high school students (including falling seniors, which was what I applied as) to learn higher maths. It’s super fun! I highly encourage anyone reading this who is a fan of math to apply >:) back to text ↑
- back to text ↑