Sunday, August 10, 2008

Dirty Ice


In the past I’ve sat quietly twisting my straw in a glass filled with mostly ice cubes and wondered about them. Why are there different shapes? Where did that little black speck come from? Why did I just pour a $5 bottle of water over water out of the tap that just happens to be frozen? How did all this cat hair get in the ice? I mean really, the freezer door is almost always closed.

It just so happens that I’m not the only one with such questions. The New York Times presented a piece about the emerging sales niche of gourmet ice. Looks like there are people out there equally committed to quality ice as quality fluid water.

It turns out, and simply explained that different shapes of ice both melt and freeze at different rates. As for the black spec..well, have you ever seen a commercial ice maker? They are surprisingly filthy. You expect water, cold, ice, that seems like a rather clean environment, wrong! I guess if you think about it, both ice, water, and wet things are rather sticky, hence the black spot, or the cat hair somehow getting stuck. I don’t know that I trust a bag of purchased ice to be any more pleasing than what I make with my little white trays, but if a restaurant or bar offered specially filtered, specially shaped or otherwise irregular ice I think that establishment would be worth a special trip.

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