Overview
Nevé Field Guide is a self-study site about frozen desserts, Traditional Chinese first, covering four areas: taxonomy, science, technique and a recipe calculator. The goal is concrete: using the calculator and the science chapters, a reader can judge whether a recipe will come out too hard or too soft, and explain why.
It is the public knowledge layer of the Nevé platform, a batch-quality and cold-chain system for artisan frozen desserts. The name is the mechanism: névé is the glaciology term for snow that has recrystallised through repeated melting and refreezing, which is exactly how ice cream degrades after it is made.
One line runs through the whole site: the recipe sets the starting point; thermal history sets the end point.
What’s on the site
| Area | Contents |
|---|---|
| Taxonomy | 12 spec cards: fat, milk solids, sugar, total solids, overrun, serving temperature, freezing method and typical failures |
| Science | 8 chapters: solids and water, sugar and PAC/POD, ice crystals, cold and unfrozen water, fat and emulsion, air and overrun, stabilisers, recrystallisation |
| Technique | 6 process stages (pasteurise → cool → age → freeze → harden and store → serve), plus symptom-first troubleshooting for 7 symptoms |
| Recipe calculator | Ingredient database, composition totals, PAC/POD, comparison with each category’s target ranges, best-scooping-temperature estimate, batch scaling and URL sharing |
Accounts are optional. Signed out, nothing is uploaded: recipes travel in URL parameters and “My Ingredients” stay in the browser. Signing in with Google syncs My Ingredients, saved recipes and batch logs to the account (Cloudflare D1), with export and account deletion.
Calculation model
- Recipe numbers only come from the calculator: the core,
neve-recipe-core, is written in Rust and compiled to WASM, so the browser and the build share the same code. No numbers are hand-written into copy, and no LLM generates quantities. - Freezing curve: PAC as sucrose-equivalent solute, the Norrish water-activity model with ice equilibrium, plus the freezing-point depression from milk salts.
- Best scooping temperature: defined as the temperature at which 70% of the water is frozen. It’s a rule of thumb, not a measured threshold, and the site says so.
- Ingredient data: 89 ingredients, with composition from Taiwan’s Food and Drug Administration (TFDA) and USDA FoodData Central and the source ID recorded. Twelve commercial products (stabiliser blends, glucose syrups and the like) still use approximate values until supplier spec sheets replace them.
Quality checks
- Golden test: the composition printed in the Carpigiani Gelato University recipe books is the baseline; 165 recipes are recalculated and compared, and
pnpm run goldenfails when a gap widens or a new one appears. - Knowledge-conflict log: every disagreement between sources is numbered and logged (44 so far), and each must be resolved in one place: site copy, the model, or the ingredient data.
- Checked against the textbook: the whole site was cross-checked chapter by chapter against Goff, Hartel & Rankin, Ice Cream (8th ed.), with citations down to chapter and page.
- Food safety only relays authorities: pasteurisation time and temperature, cooling and storage temperatures all carry sources, and the site makes no food-safety guarantee.