2. Structure

From a physico-chemical point of view, frozen desserts are multi-phase food preparations of varying degrees of sophistication, due to the nature of their components and the many forms in which they are dispersed in water, with the resulting interactions between them. The most complex form is undoubtedly ice cream, which is an oil-in-water emulsion, swelled and solidified by negative temperature, making it a tetra-phase (S/G/L/L ) food product (figure 2 ). Schematically, therefore, these frozen desserts are soft, viscoelastic solids with a frozen, expanded emulsion-type structure.