Ice: Over-complicating Simple Shit Part 2 – Clear Ice

As a continuation of  Over-complicating Simple Shit from Ice: Over-complicating Simple Shit Part 1, I make Clear Ice.

I’ve been wanting to try to make perfectly clear ice for some time. It’s a cocktail geek thing. Whenever I’m in a bar that serves perfectly clear, large blocks of ice I get Ice-Wood. I mean, look at that gorgeous Yikilth Old Fashioned made with White Rum, Cardamom Bitters, and a perfectly clear, immaculate cube of ice.

There are a bunch of guys on YouTube that have done this without much variation of technique so I didn’t really do anything different than they did. Most importantly was getting the correct cooler to freeze just the right amount of water that will fit in your freezer. I got the 5 quart one pictured. It was a little smaller than one I already had and it didn’t have any crappy grooves on the inside that could have inhibited the removal of a frozen ice block and could have messed up the nice square lines .

After filling the cooler up with filtered water, it took my freezer about 30 hours to get just enough of it frozen. People often argue that all you need to get clear ice is to boil the water beforehand so the water doesn’t contain any impurities or dissolved gasses. This may help some, but it’s really only part of the issue. If you’ve ever tried making ice cubes in a tray at home with distilled water that’s perhaps even boiled before freezing you will still not get perfectly clear ice. As we all know, water expands as it freezes which we all learned at some point in life with swollen water bottles or exploding beer left in the freezer by accident. As water freezes into ice in the little trays, that last bit of expansion in the middle of a freezing cube has no where to go. Imperfections, in the form of stress cracks, develop inside the cubes as they freeze from the outside inward as all sides receive about the same amount of chill. The trick is to force the ice to freeze from one direction, top down.

After about 30 hours in the freezer with the lid of the cooler removed, a little more than half of the water is frozen solid and crystal clear. The bottom remained mostly unfrozen which prevented any stress cracks from developing. This is where the fun begins. I did have to chip a hole in the very bottom to release the excess water from the inside. 

For the rest of the procedure you’ll need a large serrated knife, like a bread knife (mine was too small, I forgot I had another one in a different knife block), a mallet (I used a meat tenderizer as my mallet was covered in car grime), and a cutting surface that you can place in the sink so you don’t mess things up (I placed a small cutting board on a small wire rack to elevate it a bit for ease of manipulation and to catch stray pieces before they fell into the sink just in case I didn’t clean it as well as I could have). 

I used the bread knife to cut a groove into one entire side of the block, just above the area that wasn’t frozen. It didn’t have to be super deep, just a nice, even channel. At that point I swapped out knives as my little Wusthof was a bit shorter than I’d have liked and I didn’t want to chance messing up the slightly expensive knife. SO I got a larger, cheaper knife, placed it in the groove, and smacked it with the meat tenderizer. In one foul crack, just about all of the uneven bottom came right off in a split that was way more even than expected. 

I then proceeded to repeatedly score and smack the top surface of the large block to the sizes I wanted my cubes, trying to get them as square as possible. I then took each cube and placed them individually in small freezer bags and placed them in the freezer.

If you’d like to watch the procedure from beginning to end by someone who did this way better than I. I recommend Cocktail Chemistry as he’s clear, concise, and not irritating as some other YouTube presenters are.