Q: What’s involved in making gelato?
A: It’s not very complicated—you just follow the formula. You mix milk, cream, the flavour paste and sugar in the proper proportions, heat it to 85C to pasteurize it, then cool it to -13C to freeze it. It’s essential to cool the mixture quickly—our freezer can cool the gelato in 2-3 minutes—so that no ice crystals form in the mixture. That’s how we get it to be so creamy.
Q: What is a flavour paste?
A: They are special mixes that give the flavour to the gelato. For example, pistachio gelato uses a paste that is essentially a pistachio butter. We import the pastes from Italy.
Q: How long does it take?
A: I can make up to 60 litres in an hour. I always make sure to start with the lightest flavour first, then build up to a stronger flavour, for example, I’d make a simple crema gelato, then dolce de latte, then eventually mint. You don’t want to make the mint first, because it would flavour everything that you made after it.
Q: How much milk do you use?
A: Well, the milkman comes three times a week…he was just here and dropped off 72 litres of milk and 12 litres of cream. On our busiest day last year we sold 1,000 scoops of gelato…two weeks ago we sold 700.
Q: How long have you been in the gelato business?
A: About three years. It was something I’d always wanted to do and it seemed like a good business opportunity—Canadians eat more ice cream than almost anyone else.
Q: How did you learn to make gelato?
A: I went to a special school in Italy, not far from Venice. It’s called Artigeniale, and they specialize in teaching about gelato and dessert making. The gelato course was a week long, and the course on making gelato cakes was three days long. When I came back to Canada I hired someone and taught him how, and now he’s the one who makes most of the gelato here.
Q: Any special gelato-tasting tips?
A: If you want to know if a store’s gelato is good, try the pistachio. Some companies will blend their pistachio nuts with peanuts when they’re making the flavour paste, because it’s cheaper. So if you taste peanuts, you’ll know the gelato’s no good.
Q: What is your favourite flavour of gelato?
A: They’re all good, but as my chief gelato maker says, “Italian gelato is the Lamborghini of ice cream, and dolce de latte is the Diablo (the fanciest Lamborghini there is).”
This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 5, 2006.