Legend has it that sorbet was invented by Nero, though some contend Marco Polo brought it back from the Orient.

How and wherever it first originated, sorbet today is loaded with stabilizers to extend its freezer life and provide a smooth texture. These stabilizers give the fruity frozen dessert a pronounced flavour, but many commercial stabilizers contain gelatin, which is made from animal skin and bones. That removes sorbet from the shopping list of many vegetarians, a significant market niche.

Jonathan Khouzam, Francis Marcogliese and Simon Leclerc, all 19, are students at CÉGEP Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf in Montreal. And, says Jonathan, “we really, really love sorbet.”

Jonathan had a science background, had previously worked as a pastry chef, and knew that frozen dessert recipes were relatively simple from a chemical standpoint. As a class project he and his two schoolmates decided to see if they could make a vegetarian stabilizer.

With the guidance of mentor Ihsan El Imrani, a biology professor at the college, they set up a well-defined series of experiments. They prepared 15 blends of vegetable-based stabilizing agents κ-carrageenan, HA gellan, and HM pectin and compared them to a sorbet prepared using a commercial stabilizer and one with no stabilizer at all.

They devised criteria to assess texture based on size of ice crystals (using an optical microscope), hardness (using a compression test similar to stress tests used in metallurgy), and measured the amount of air in the mix.

Remarkably they found that many of their stabilizer blends score better on their texture tests, several were less expensive to make than commercial stabilizers currently on the market.

Prof. El Imrani is impressed with the high level of creativity the students showed. “Despite their limited funding and lack of specific apparatus they were able to develop their own methods of quantitative analysis,” she says “They were also able to reach out to the industry by translating their results into a product.”

And the blend may have commercial possiblities. “The flavour is less pronounced and the blend accommodates vegetarian consumers,” she adds.

And will science play a part in the students’ future? “Absolutely,” says Jonathan, who plans a career in food chemistry, while Simon is going into medicine and Francis will study biomedical engineering.