How to Freeze Champagne
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Use a galvanized iron or wooden pail, preferably iron, about 13 inches deep and 7.5 inches in diameter at the bottom.
Mix the ice and rock salt in the pail until well combined.
Chill the bottle
Place the champagne bottle in the pail and gently turn it back and forth for 12-18 minutes, depending on whether it was pre-chilled.
Alternatively, leave the bottle in the salted ice for 30 minutes without turning.
Serve
Serve the champagne in a metal silver-plated pail with salted ice around it.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Ice
- Provides the cold mass that draws heat out of the bottle as it melts.
- Rock salt
- Lowers the freezing point of the melting ice, so the salted ice water becomes colder than plain ice.
The step that matters
Mixing the salt into the ice. Salt dissolves in the thin layer of meltwater on the ice and lowers its freezing point, so the mixture stays colder than ice alone. Unevenly mixed salt leaves warm spots, so the bottle chills unevenly or more slowly.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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