Original subtitles

[upbeat music]

- [Adam] This sweet treat

is universally loved the world over,

comes in every flavor imaginable,

contains every toping and every item imaginable.

It can be crunchy,

creamy,

chewy, gooey,

even spicy.

You can spoon it, you can drink it,

you can put it in a dish with all your favorite toppings.

I have to tell you guys, this is one of those days

where I can't believe I get paid to do this

because today we're going to an ice cream factory.

[upbeat music]

98% of all US households have ice cream at home

at this very moment.

And in fact, the average American eats about 23 pounds

of ice cream per year each.

The US produces 1.5 billion pounds a year,

and ice cream is an $11 billion a year industry.

But ice cream is more than big business,

Baskin Robbins,

Dreyers,

Carvel,

Dairy Queen,

Turkey Hill,

they're famous brands,

but they're also part of treasured memories.

- [Tom Carvel÷ And year your Carvel dealer

makes him loaded with fudge and nuts,

and you can get fudgie with an ocean to serve 20 people.

[upbeat music]

- [Adam] And today we will answer some

of your most burning ice-cream questions like,

where exactly did the ice cream cone come from?

How are new ice cream flavors created,

and how can I get that job?

Where, and when can you taste ice cream at its very best?

And most importantly,

that delicious carton of cookie dough ice cream

sitting in your freezer right now,

we'll discover how it's made from start to finish.

I scream for it, you scream for it,

but today we get the inside scoop

because this is Modern Marvels' Ice cream.

[upbeat music]

[upbeat music]

- [Adam] Today, I'm gonna start at the Turkey Hill Dairy.

It overlooks the Susquehanna River,

right here in Conestoga, Pennsylvania.

The dairy is a massive operation that sits on 72 acres

and they produce over 70 different ice cream varieties.

Started as a humble dairy in 1931,

it has now grown so big that they produce 25 million gallons

of ice cream per year.

And today I am lucky enough to have a tour

with this fine fellow,

who is also the great grandson

of the founder of Turkey Hill.

- That's correct.

[upbeat music]

- [Adam] Turkey Hill started making ice cream in 1954,

using Derek's own great- grandmother's home recipes.

And guess what?

They still use some of his great-grandmother's recipes

for Turkey Hill's premium label ice cream today.

So your great grandmother made it by hand in 1954,

but how are you making it in the 21st century?

Will you show me?

- Absolutely, let's go check it out.

- Let's do it, all right.

- [Adam] Let's go make some ice cream.

Today, Turkey Hill is whipping up a batch

of chocolate chip cookie dough,

the number five most popular ice cream flavor in America.

Before we get started,

I need to get kitted out in some special gear,

both to protect me,

and to make sure the only thing I'm adding

to the production process are my brilliant insights.

- [Derek] So this is the receiving bay.

So before we can make any ice cream,

we've gotta bring in some raw milk.

[upbeat music]

- [Adam] Whoa, look how massive this thing is.

I mean, how much milk does this hold?

- This tanker holds about 6,000 gallons.

- How many cows realistically would it take

to fill something like this?

- Hundreds.

Yeah, it takes a lot of cows, several farms.

- How many of these come in every day?

- We're averaging about six trucks a day.

- Wow.

You know one of those big concrete mixer trucks,

holds pretty close to 3000 gallons of concrete.

If you filled it with ice cream from Turkey Hill instead,

you'd need 30 of them a day

to match Turkey Hill's daily output

of 100,000 gallons of ice cream.

The milk is then offloaded

to the plants massive 60,000 gallon silos.

But first let's test this milk,

to see if it meets Turkey Hill's high standards.

- Top of the world mom.

- [Mikey] Well, this is where it's all....

- [Adam] Where does it hook to?

- [Adam] For this, I get to work with Mikey,

the processing receiving tech.

- Oh, y'all hooked up.

- Make sure you don't jump down.

- No, no, no.

The wedgie is so real right now.

[Mikey laughs]

- So the first thing we do is we check the temperature.

So the range for milk is from 32 to 40 degrees.

- Okay

- There's the milk.

So we got about 35, that's perfect.

- [Adam] It's under 40, nice.

- Now we're gonna get the sample.

- Okay, let's do it.

Check out the master at work, what a boss!

This is awesome.

But they need two samples, so now it's my turn.

- Good luck.

[calm music]

- Oh I suck, I'm sorry.

- [Mikey] We want the sample inside the bag.

- [Adam] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[both laughing]

All right so now we're gonna take this to lab,

and look under a microscope for bacteria.

- [Mikey] Bacteria and antibiotics.

[upbeat music]

- [Adam] Antibiotics are sometimes used

to treat sick livestock,

but no antibiotics should ever make it into the milk

or ice cream you buy.

It's the law people.

- [Mikey] So no antibiotics.

Bacteria in milk can make you very sick.

They don't help the flavor either.

This is the new CSI, it's cream science investigating.

- All right, so I'm looking for the colonies,

right now I don't see any, I think it's looking good.

- [Adam] Wow.

All right, so the next step is taking it out of that truck?

- [Mikey] Yep we go hook up the hose and start it up.

[calm music]

- 6,000 gallons of milk will flow from our tanker truck

to the massive storage silos outside,

ready for us to turn it

into delicious Turkey Hill chocolate chip,

cookie dough, ice cream.

- Come on, let's go.

- [Derek] This room right here,

this is really where we start to make ice cream.

But before we start that, I want you to try these flavors

of ice cream that we've got sitting right here.

They look like vastly different flavors.

But they do have one thing in common,

and I'd like you to figure out what it is.

- So party cake, I'm gonna take a spoon,

really dig in there and get the good stuff.

It tastes like the essence of an awesome ice cream cake.

Black raspberry.

Wow, okay.

OG vanilla,

oh my God, awesome.

Let's take ice cream parlor vanilla.

Okay so for my fellow mint chocolate chip lovers,

Oh man.

[upbeat music]

Oh man, come on.

All right.

So you asked me to discern what the mint chocolate chip,

the vanilla, the black raspberry, and the party cake

have in common.

Here it is ready?

- Lay it on me man.

the dairy milk isn't lost.

Feel like there's milk in my ice cream,

that's the best way I can describe it.

- [Derek] Yeah, absolutely.

- That's what I'm getting.

How far off am I?

- I think you're like right there,

and really the thing that ties all these flavors together

is they use the same base ice cream mix.

- Oh wait.

Even, I mean,

could you think of, I mean, you guys at home,

could you think of two flavors,

more different than these two?

Mint chip and black raspberry.

And they start with the exact same base?

- Exact same base.

- [Derek] Let's do it. - [Adam] Let's do it.

- [Derek] Okay Adam, I'll let you select the recipe here.

- Okay.

- We'd like to do premium white.

- And how many gallons should I enter?

- 3000.

- We're gonna make 3000 gallons of ice cream!

- 3000 gallons of ice cream mix.

That's 3000 gallons silo,

is actually gonna yield about 6,000 gallons

of finished product,

because of the fact that we add air to ice cream,

as well as other ingredients such as cookie dough

and chocolate chips.

- [Adam] Time to fire this batch up.

And sorry to disappoint all you home confectioners,

but Turkey Hill keeps all their ice cream recipes,

top secret.

Okay, you can't see this, this is censored.

Let's light this candle. - Woo hoo!

[machine whirring]

- [Adam] Please, after you sir.

- [Derek] Oh, all right.

- No harness, yay!

Hey, are you looking at my bootie?

You know, not my tush, but my bootie, see.

- [Derek] All right.

- [Adam] Wow!

[machine whirring]

- [Derek] At this point, it's just milk and sugar.

So sugars are coming in up here.

- [Adam] Oh, that is liquified sugar.

This is the coolest thing ever.

There's like basically like a waterfall

of sugar coming into this, it's amazing.

Ice cream production today looks very different

than it did prior to the 20th century

when making ice cream took some serious muscle power.

Back then ice cream makers used hand cranked freezer buckets

simultaneously freezing their mixed with ice and rock salt

while churning it to keep it air rated.

Early American ice cream fans included our founding fathers.

George Washington reportedly spent $200 on ice cream

during the summer of 1790.

That's about $5,600 today.

And you know that Thomas Jefferson wrote the declaration

of independence, but did you know,

he also wrote one of America's earliest recipes

for vanilla ice cream?

How we serve ice cream has evolved too.

A key turning point in that story happened

at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.

- Ernest A Hamwi, was a Syrian vendor who was making zalabia

which are crispy waffle like pastries.

And right next door, there was an ice cream vendor.

And people were buying his waffles,

and then quickly going over to the ice cream stall

and getting their ice cream.

- That gave Hamwi an idea,

an idea we should still be thanking him for.

He took one of his waffles, rolled it into a funnel shape

and Presto, the ice cream cone was born.

- There are many different stories about the origin

of the ice cream cone,

but it's the 1904 World's Fair

that really solidifies it as a popular item

and a vehicle for ice cream here in America.

[upbeat music]

- [Adam] Today, the biggest ice cream cone company

in the world is Joy Cone.

At their factory in Pennsylvania,

they produce an astounding 10 million cones a day.

- I'm David George, I'm the president and CEO of Joy Cone.

So Joy was started in 1918 by my grandfather, Albert George.

Albert was a Lebanese immigrant.

The very first oven was hand operated,

so it was really slow.

My dad took over in 1964,

he came up with the Joy name for the brand,

and that's when we really started to see some nice growth.

Today we make almost 3 billion cones a year.

- [Adam] Plant manager, Tyler Tupper

is a 17 year Joy Cone veteran.

- We make sugar cones, waffle cones, cade cups,

in many different varieties.

- [Adam] Their 550,000 square foot facility is big,

very big.

Imagine almost 10 football fields,

cranking out ice cream cones, 24 hours a day,

seven days a week.

[diesel engine revving]

It all starts with a daily delivery of flour.

Anywhere from eight to 26 truckloads

arrive every single week.

- Each of the silos holds about 150,000 pounds of flour.

In total will go through about 50 million pounds

of flour each year.

[upbeat music]

- [Adam] From here, the flour flows

into the batter room.

- [Tyler] So the first ingredient

to be added is the brown sugar.

We use brown sugar because it makes a much stronger cone,

it's better flavor, and it gives it it's brown color.

In all we go through about 7 million pounds

of sugar annually here in this location.

The water is then added

and then the whole mixture starts to get mixed together.

- [Adam] Once the batter is mixed,

it can be pumped out to any of 71 ovens in the plant.

- The patties go through the oven.

It's about 350 degrees in about 90 seconds,

and we make about 6,000 an hour.

At this point, when the patties come out,

they're very soft and pliable.

The patties are then fed into a spinner

which wraps the cone and gives it its form.

- [Adam] At this point, the cone is at its best,

fresh and warm.

Now it's time to pack these babies up

and get them headed towards your scoop of ice cream.

- [Tyler] And the cones are automatically packaged

into a carton.

And then it goes into an automated case packer.

It'll remain in the warehouse until we need it for shipment,

at which point it will be loaded onto a truck

and could really be shipped anywhere in the world.

[upbeat music]

- [Adam] Including an ice cream parlor near you.

If you love your ice cream on a cone,

chances are you've had a Joy Cone.

Back at Turkey Hill, it's time to drop some science

on that ice cream mix that we just made.

- This baby right here, this is the pasteurization unit.

We heat the mix up to 180.

We run it through these holding tubes.

- [Adam] So it holds it at that temperature.

- Holds it, and it's timed out to last 30 seconds.

From there we're gonna send it over to the homogenizer.

- [Adam] Gotcha.

And those are those pistons.

They're actually gonna make sure that all the particles,

the fat, the actual milk particles,

the flavoring elements, everything is the same size.

And that kind of evenness

is what makes that creamy feeling in your mouth.

And then where does it go?

- So we're gonna drop it down to 34 degrees,

before we put it into a holding tank,

and take it down to ice cream production.

- And the holding tanks are just over here.

- Right out here, follow me.

- [Adam] Lead on.

Well, they say money can't buy you love,

but it can buy your ice cream.

In fact, the world spends about $175 million on ice cream

every single day.

Here at Turkey Hill,

we've got our premium white mix churning

in these massive vats.

Now it's time to see how it transforms

into chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

[upbeat music]

- [Derek] This room can hold about 100,000 gallons.

- So can this room.

[laughs]

- [Adam] Okay so we're actually gonna get a chance

to try a sample from these massive tanks.

- [Derek] Sure are.

- [Adam] So this isn't ice cream yet,

this is just the base.

It hasn't gone through freezing,

and it has no added flavorings or cookie dough.

I'm very curious to see how it tastes.

- We're going to take one of our syringes,

put it in the sample port,

slowly draw out the ice cream mix.

- [Adam]. Okay.

- [Derek] Oh, look at that.

- [Adam] Oh, wow, look at that.

Okay we carefully withdraw this.

- [Derek] Excellent.

- Okay.

Wow flavored coffee creamer, eat your heart out.

This is a prodo ice cream.

- It's a special sauce right there.

[calm music]

- Oh, come on.

It's like the smell old fashioned vanilla

is the first three words that came to mind.

It's just amazing.

you will ever have ever.

[upbeat music]

Part of what makes ice cream mix at this stage so delicious

is how creamy it is,

which reminds me of another frozen treat

that we all know and love.

We can talk about ice cream without talking about,

soft serve.

Soft serve has less milk fat and more air

than hard ice cream.

You can't buy it at a supermarket

because it takes a special machine to keep soft serve

at a low but not completely frozen temperature.

Soft serve wasn't invented until the 1930s.

And as soon as it was, America fell in love with it, fast.

By the 1950s, soft serve was outselling hard ice cream

and estimated 150 million gallons of it

was consumed in 1957 alone.

But here is where it gets even more interesting.

The origins of soft serve are hotly debated

and this ice cream battle royale involves two names

you just may have heard of, Dairy Queen and Carvel.

Dairy Queen founder, J.F. McCullough,

first sold ice cream in its softer pre hardened state

in 1938.

He's sold 1600 servings of his new product

in less than two hours the first day he offered it.

But it took several years

before McCullough perfected a freezer

that reliably dispense soft serve.

It was actually based off a machine used for frozen custard,

which is neither ice cream nor soft serve.

- Frozen custard by legal definition

has to have 1.4% or more egg yolk.

People love custard,

because the egg yolk gives it a more robust texture.

- [Adam] Meanwhile, Carvel founder, Tom Carvel,

hit upon the idea for soft serve

when his freezer truck broke down in 1934.

Realizing his product would soon literally melt away,

Tom quickly started selling it to anyone and everyone

who stopped by, and was surprised

to find people loved the melty softer version of his ice cream.

[upbeat music]

The rest is soft serve history.

[upbeat music]

Today, we're going behind the curtain at Carvel

in Hackensack, New Jersey.

Since 1974, this location has been run

by a husband and wife team

who trained under Tom Carvel himself.

- Hi what can I get for you.

- That customer walks in the door,

they have a hundred percent of your attention.

[calm music]

- [Adam] While Tom Sasso was training under Tom Carvel,

the company's founder and namesake

was working on a new idea.

Ice cream cakes had existed in America

since at least the 19th century.

Tom Carvel's revolutionary concept

was to create themed ice cream cakes,

using signature ingredients

and then tie them to particular holidays.

Carvel's most iconic cake was launched in 1977

to celebrate a whale of a dad on father's day,

Fudgie the Whale.

His homemade commercials for, it quickly became a sensation.

- It was Tom's voice.

[upbeat music]

- [Tom Carvel] Fudgie the Whale is back.

That's a whale of a cake for a whale of a dad,

at your participating Carvel ice cream store yup,

and this year your Carvel dealer makes them loaded

with fudge and nuts.

- We had a line out the door waiting two hours

for that cake.

[upbeat music]

- [Adam] Today, Anthony Simione will provide us

with a behind the scenes look

at how the famous Fudgie the whale cake gets made.

- The crunchies are basically the offline sauces crackers

broken up in a specific size,

so like this we're able to spread them

in a layer of our cakes.

- [Adam] Carvel introduced their flying saucer

ice cream sandwiches way back in 1951.

They're made with rich chocolate cookies.

- [Anthony] Brown Bonnet is a chocolate shell that we use.

What this does is it coats the crunchies,

it enables the cake to stay together.

Carvel cakes, Carvel crunchies.

- [Adam] You can't make an ice cream cake

without ice cream.

to the soft serve machine.

And the secret ingredient is...

...still a secret.

[upbeat music]

- [Anthony] It's a special formula

that only a few people know.

So once we take a cold mold out of the freezer,

what we're gonna do is we're gonna apply a layer

of vanilla ice cream into the mold.

We're gonna put a layer of crunchies in it,

next we're going to put a layer of chocolate.

- [Adam] After five hours in the freezer,

Anthony's Fudgie the Whale cake is ready to be decorated.

- [Anthony] Once we've added the fudge,

we add that layer of delicious crunchies.

[upbeat music]

We hear many stories from customers, why they buy fudgie.

It reminds them of happy times.

They wanna share fudgie with friends and family,

and there you have it, Fudgie the Whale.

- Ice cream is almost, Tom, I think thought of it as a gift.

Even today, our customers come in,

they're coming in to get happy.

You know, they are escaping back

to when they were 12 years old,

had no problems and a cone in their hand.

- [Adam] You know you want it, you know you love it,

you know you can never get enough.

Ice cream, baby!

So fasten your seat belts,

because we're now at my favorite stage

of the ice cream making process,

adding the flavors and inclusions!

Inclusions are like toppings,

but swirled right into the ice cream itself.

And Turkey Hill Manufacturing Manager Michelle Finch

wants to put my taste buds to the test

with some secret samples.

- Let's try the blue one. [laughs]

- Oh my gosh.

It's like Smurf DNA, right here.

[intriguing music]

It tastes like the icing on a birthday cake.

- Absolutely correct.

That's the icing that goes in our party cake ice cream.

- That is crazy!

- Now let's blow your mind.

Let's put one of those on your spoon.

[Michelle laughs]

- It doesn't make any sense.

It tastes like a cake and icing.

How did you do that?

How did you squeeze a whole cake into a pebble?

- [Michelle] It's magic.

That's what makes our party cake ice cream the best.

- Do you ever just mess around with these things

and just make really delicious little things to eat?

- [Michelle] Not typically, but we can.

- All right, so, I'm gonna see.

I'm gonna start off with some of these.

They look like roasted salted almonds,

so they'll have a little bit of a saltiness,

a little bit of

a kinda charred smokiness. - Do you know what would

be really good on there?

- Let's say it on three. Ready?

One, two, three.

- [Adam & Michelle] Caramel.

- [Adam] Great minds think alike.

All right, let's get it going.

[anticipatory orchestral music]

[laughing] Okay.

We've done it, here.

We've done it here.

R&D, call me!

Okay. Well, thank you for letting me do this.

What do we do next?

- [Michelle] We're gonna go into the production area,

and make cookie dough ice cream.

- Lead on, my lady!

[playful curious music]

- This is exactly where

the mix will come into the flavor batch!

- [Adam] What's that?

- I'm gonna have you add the cookie dough flavor!

- Thank you, thank you.

[Michelle laughs]

- [Adam] Our premium white mix still tastes like vanilla

until we add this.

- [Michelle] That's the cookie dough ice cream flavor!

- [Adam] That is so awesome.

- And you just made your first cookie dough ice cream mix.

- I love it, and the smell is amazing.

Cookie dough is one of the country's favorite flavors.

In fact, it's hard to find anyone who doesn't like it!

And you could say the same for my favorite flavor,

mint chocolate chip,

which, legend has it, was conceived in 1973

by a British culinary student

who won a contest to provide ice cream

for Princess Anne's wedding,

or Neapolitan ice cream, which was brought to America

by immigrants from Naples

in the late 19th century.

But other cultures have even more variety than we do,

like squid,

cow tongue,

and raw horse flesh.

To be clear, not just horse flesh,

but raw horse flesh.

You can chase all these flavors

the next time you visit Tokyo.

Not wetting your appetite?

The fact is that coming up with new ice cream flavors

that appeal to large swaths of the public

is an art in and of itself.

Welcome to an ice cream shrine

very few have been blessed to enter.

The Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream test kitchen,

where new ice cream flavors are born!

One of the greatest ice cream flavors of all time,

Rocky Road, was invented by founders William Dreyer

and Joseph Edy.

Dryer's Grand Ice Cream

has been the company name since 1948,

but in the eighties,

Dryer's was expanding east of the Rockies

into markets that were already selling

Breyers brand ice cream.

They decided to use the Edy's label in those areas,

so their product wouldn't be confused with Breyers.

Today, we get a secret glimpse of the development team

as they test out a new flavor,

one that looks back to Rocky Road for inspiration.

Dryer and Edy added marshmallows and chopped walnuts

to chocolate ice cream in 1929,

and called their new flavor Rocky Road

because America had just fallen into the great depression,

and had a rocky road ahead of it.

A big reason for Rocky Road's enduring popularity

has to do with its texture.

The gooeyness of marshmallows is a perfect counterpoint

to the crunch of the nuts,

so, taking that as inspiration,

the team uses brownies to get the gooey texture

similar to marshmallows.

But what about the crunch?

First, they try chocolate rice.

- [Tester] I would like the crunch a lot.

I'm not personally sold yet

that a rice crunch goes well with brownie.

- [Adam] Next, they dried toffee.

- [Agata] Toffee is yummy,

but is it taking away from the brownie?

- [Tester] Yeah.

What was that material

we looked at a couple of weeks ago, Agata?

- [Agata] Brownie brittle.

Let me have one of those mixing bowls.

- [Adam] To find the right crunch for their new flavor,

the team turns to brownie brittle!

They mix it in with the gooey regular brownies,

and also brownie batter.

- [Tester 2] Oh my gosh.

- [Tester] I think this is it! - [Tester 3] That's so good!

The next step is to refine the ingredients

and make sure the new flavor works well

when produced on a larger scale.

- Take the brownies up just a smidge more.

- [Adam] The development team

will keep working on the new flavor until it's perfected

and ready for mass production on the factory floor.

Back at Turkey Hill,

to our cookie dough ice cream.

- You're a pro!

- [Adam] These look too good not to try!

- Cheers! - Cheers!

What's different about the cookie dough

in cookie dough ice cream,

and what do we add next?

Here at the Turkey Hill ice cream factory,

we just put the pedal to the metal

and added cookie dough to our cookie dough ice cream.

It's delicious!

And it has, like, the same granularity

of real cookie dough!

That's the thing that I love!

It doesn't taste artificial.

You could keep your tequila

to be a cookie dough shooter.

But I'm learning there is a lot more than just cookie dough

in this cookie dough ice cream.

- [Michelle] So, that's a liquid chip.

- [Adam] Wait, wait.

Liquid chip?

- Liquid chip. - Like, liquid chocolate chip?

- Yeah.

When it goes into the ice cream,

it's like a little sheet going into the ice cream,

and it solidifies.

- Oh, the cold of the ice cream hardens it!

- Yes.

- They extrude liquid warm chocolate

into freezing cold ice cream,

it hardens, and it breaks in the churning process

so you get those awesome, irregular bits

- [Elizabeth] Slivers!

that are rigid, and they're a little chewy.

It's like chocolate chip 2.0.

It's amazing!

Liquid chocolate chips, people.

We are living in the future!

Our ice cream batch is almost ready,

and here is where it gets loaded into cartons.

And if you follow this pipe,

it goes all the way back to right where we were standing,

where you see the cookie dough.

The cookie dough balls go in.

There's the chocolate.

So, you have the liquid chip, the ice cream meet,

that cookie dough meet, it gets mixed together,

the lids go in here,

and right here is literally where the rubber meets the road.

Container goes down, and the ice cream goes right here.

And look how creamy it is!

It's actually closer to soft serve

than hard scoop ice cream.

I love when ice cream is this consistency.

There's nothing like it in the world.

- No, this is the best way you can get it.

- I agree.

and when I die, I want you to bury me in one of these tubs.

[upbeat music]

- [Adam] These cartons are destined for home freezers

all across America,

but before the home freezer became common in the 1940s,

ice cream was a destination,

and the places where we enjoyed ice cream

became cultural touchstones,

starting soon after the revolution in 1776

with the emergence of the ice cream parlor.

- [Michael] Where ice cream was particularly popular

in that sort of early post-revolutionary period

was in these places called pleasure gardens.

They would specialize in things like ice cream and lemonade.

It was a relatively respectable place to go,

versus the bars and the taverns

where no respectable woman would be seen.

- [Adam] But as the 20th century dawned,

ice cream parlors had to compete for customers

with a new ice cream destination, the soda fountain.

The first soda fountains

actually appeared in drug stores and pharmacies.

They marketed their soft drinks as health tonics

with ingredients that truly packed a punch,

like cocaine and the digestive enzyme, pepsin,

before they expanded their offerings.

- [Michael] They came up with various kinds of new ways

of combining soda and ice cream,

so this is where you get that ice cream float

that became popular throughout the 20th century.

- [Adam] And with the rise of prohibition in 1920,

soda fountains' popularity exploded even more!

You could enjoy an ice cold Coca-Cola

or Hires' root beer float

at more than 100,000 soda fountains across the US.

- [Michael] Once they close the bars and the taverns,

where are you gonna socialize?

- [Adam] Prohibition ended in 1933,

and soda fountains have since waned in popularity,

but the ice cream parlor remains a top spot

for both high school dates and family fun two centuries on.

[upbeat music]

We've made or mix, added our inclusions,

and now we're finally loading up

those iconic Turkey Hill cartons

with our own batch of cookie dough ice cream.

All right, so, now, where are they going

once they're filled?

- [Michelle] At this point,

we're gonna take every container over,

and put the code date on the bottom of the container.

- [Adam] The code, so, like,

- [Michelle] Then they go through a metal detector

'cause, of course, we wanna make sure

that there's no foreign objects in our ice cream.

- That's a metal detector? - Yep!

- [Adam] So, we saw quality control,

even coming from the milk.

But,

even on the way out, they're getting a date,

a batch number, the time they were made,

who is the operator,

and then they run through a metal detector

for even extra added level of safety.

- [Michelle] So, this is the best part.

We're gonna taste the ice cream.

- Finally!

Hallelujah!

- So, this is your container.

- [laughing] Oh, my precious.

- So, there's two parts to this, alright?

One is, we're gonna dip through it

to just make sure that we've got cookie dough pieces

and the chocolate chips all throughout it,

and then, whatever's on the lid, you can taste.

Hold it like a spoon.

- Oh, you do it like that?

- And we're gonna dip through that.

- Oh, hell yeah!

- The best scoop of ice cream you've ever had!

- I can eat it like this? Right here?

[playful curious music]

[Michelle laughs]

- Good.

- [laughing] It's really good.

Oh my God.

This is unlike any ice cream you're ever going to have,

'cause you know why?

Before you freeze it, I think you really taste

the characteristic of every ingredient.

You taste the cream, you taste the milk,

you get the little tiny liquid chips, the cookie dough.

It's a different soft than the ice cream.

I'm telling you, if you can go to a creamery,

if you go to Turkey Hill,

it's better than every soft serve,

it's better than every hard pack.

I just oh, I want a spoon and some privacy. That's it.

[Michelle laughs]

- [Adam] Alright.

So, now that goes to the freezer?

- We'll pack six, - By 6?

- in a case.

That six pack will then go into the freezer.

- If you, being nice, patient, informed,

and letting me do fun stuff weren't enough,

you gave me a bite of, arguably,

some of the best ice cream I've ever had

in the coolest way imaginable,

so I'm giving you an air hug and an elbow bump.

You're so cool, Michelle. Thank you so much.

I'm gonna go find a treadmill, and I'ma take some ice cream.

[Michelle laughs]

- [Adam] That's it!

is on its way to a supermarket near you.

In many ways, the story of ice cream in America

is like the story of America itself!

It's been with us from our earliest days,

and has grown and changed just as our country has.

Whether in a cake or a cone

or straight off the factory line,

it was amazing to see how it's made,

Wow!

And meet the wonderful people

whose work brings millions of smiles

to ice cream lovers, like myself, every day.

Now, if I could only decide which flavor I wanna have next.

Where do you guys keep the mint chocolate chip?