Look! Dry Ice at the Grocery Store

We don't usually see dry ice at our grocery store, so we were surprised to see it at a Ralph's in Pasadena. Dry ice seems like a specialty good, hazardous and unusual, so we started wondering why it would be available so freely.

Turns out there's a lot you can do with dry ice.

Dry ice isn't just used by fishpackers and ice cream sellers - even though that is one of its primary uses. Dry ice can keep food cold and frozen for days. It's frozen carbon dioxide, which gets extremely cold and melts slowly. It's actually a frozen gas (not a liquid) so it's also less messy than regular ice. But it's also more dangerous - it can burn you if you touch it directly, so caution must be used in handling it.

It just seems very high-strength for a grocery store ice cooler. It makes sense in disaster-prone areas, though, since a small amount of dry ice can keep your freezer safely frozen for several days. It's much more efficient than water-based ice.

We discovered, too, a good harvest use for dry ice! It turns out that you can flash-freeze fruits and vegetables, getting them instantly frozen so they retain more flavor and nutrients as you pack them away for the winter. See a good thread on this here:

• Flash freezing with dry ice at GardenWeb

On a more frivolous note, you can also throw parties with dry ice. Some friends recently threw a dry ice party where they froze fruit (it splinters and shatters when broken), put dry ice in drinks to make them smoke, and did other fun party tricks. You have to be careful of course - this isn't a party theme for kids. But it might make a great and novel Halloween party theme this year.

Do you ever use dry ice? What do you use it for?

• More info on dry ice: Dry Ice Info

(Image: Faith Durand)

Comments (11)

In grad school, a lab colleague's thing to do was to put a small amount of dry ice in a rubber/latex glove,seal it, put the glove in a sink of warm water (tie it down to the sink) and see how much the glove expands before exploding....Quite impressive the first couple of times.

Maybe it's for Halloween enthusiasts. Cauldrons and all that.

There are only two uses for dry ice: 1. making homemade rootbeer in a black plastic cauldron and putting dry ice in it to make it smoke; 2. taking an empty two liter bottle, putting a cup or so of liquid in the bottom and some pieces of dry ice and watching it explode.

when I was in high school we use to have parties in my chemistry class and we would use dry ice in our drinks. dry ice is fun but I don't think our grocery store sells it. just regular ice.

My husband and his friend used to use it in high school when they went camping to make baked Alaska.

I work in a lab and occasionally borrow some dry ice for cool Halloween party effects - putting it in cauldrons and drinks and such. However, a guy in a lab that I used to work in used it to cool down his Coca-Cola and accidentally inhaled a tiny piece. They had to take him to the emergency room - he couldn't breathe since his lung was full of carbon dioxide. Not cool - so be careful!

I can't wait until I can get liquid nitrogen at the grocery store. That's really the way to flash freeze stuff...

When we get out of the lab and go to take samples out in the middle of nowhere for a week at a time, we take dry ice in our coolers - it makes all our regular ice last longer. But woe betide you if any of your food touches the dry ice (esp. any of your vegetables).

I always have lived near markets that carry dry ice(year round) I thought that was the norm. I have never bought any or used any.

Sorry, science geek here: it's not a frozen gas, exactly, since once you freeze it a gas transitions to a solid by definition. CO2 just boils WAY below room temp and tends to sublimate (transition directly from solid to gas) instead of going to a liquid and then to a gas the way water ice would. If you were following the discovery of water on Mars, they saw water ice sublimate there the way dry ice does here.

Just a cautionary note: If you're going to use dry ice for drinks, put a large chunk in the punch bowl (or whatever you're using), making it "smoke" in that creepy witchy way. DON'T put pieces of it directly in glasses people drink from since, like you mention, the risk for serious injuries is imminent if the ice touches your lips, tongue etc.

One other fun thing to do with dry ice:
put it in a bowl with soapy water. instant vapor-filled bubbles that expand in a creepy way and pop, releasing white vapor.

i'll echo the other warnings about not putting bits of dry ice directly in drinks.

it works great to cool a punch bowl or a carboy since it won't dilute your beverage like regular ice will. use caution with alcohol because it gets things colder than you're used to and you won't taste the alcohol.