Week Twenty: Gelato

Last week and this week have been a nice exploration of my start in ice cream making. Last week we saw how I literally got started with my mum’s ice cream machine and my dad’s tidiness, and this week is all about how I started making historic ice creams.

For a book that I’ve never made a single recipe from, Gelato Messina can take a lot of credit for my approach to ice cream. I had spent some time darting around different recipes from different sources, including my most used learning resources Hello My Name Is Ice Cream, and having driven myself half insane with perfectionism before realising that I don’t want to make Ben & Jerry’s because I could just go out and buy a tub of Ben & Jerry’s, I decided I wanted to make something special that was just mine. I wondered if proper gelato could be my thing, which led to me buying Gelato Messina. It reads as a wonderfully well informed book and I’m sure it would enable the reader to make excellent gelato, but I never made it past the introduction. There is the oldest gelato recipe that the author could find, and the reader is encouraged to make it once, I think to realise how much better modern recipes are. But looking back to old recipes appealed to the history nerd in me, and so I ended up deep diving into the history of ice cream and in time found the Gunter’s confectioners and the rest is history, no pun intended. We’re back to historic recipes, after a few weeks of more modern ice cream, but not the Gunter’s recipes. I’m righting something I’ve been remiss in, and I’m making that old gelato recipe. It was, after all, the recipe that started everything for me. 

What is the difference between ice cream and gelato? Gelato literally means ‘frozen’ in Italian, so literally any ice cream could be called gelato in Italian and that’s it. But when we think of gelato, they are differences between it and ice cream. The first of the main differences is butterfat. Ice cream has to be 10% butterfat by most legal definitions; the premium ice cream is higher. I generally make ice cream at about 20% butterfat. In contrast, gelato is around 7% butterfat, there’s a much higher milk to cream ratio in gelato. If you’ve ever had proper gelato, you’ll know it’s lovely and dense and creamy, so how does it achieve this with less butterfat? And that’s down to the second main difference: air. To be fair, this applies more in a commercial setting than the home one for reasons we’ll come to in a minute, but gelato is churned at slower speeds which means far less air is added to it - technically a lower overrun - and hence the denser texture. The reason this is largely irrelevant at home is most home ice cream machines churn at slow speeds anyway. The third main difference is the serving temperature, gelato being typically served two or three degrees warmer than ice cream. 

The recipe was just ingredients. There were no instructions, but it didn’t take much imagination to decide to make a custard of it. 

Oldest gelato

Ingredients

I made 1000g but the percentages mean you can make any amount you like.

668.2g Jersey whole (5% butterfat) milk* (66.82%)

129g egg yolk (12.9%)

202.8g caster sugar (20.28%)

* This is a particular type of whole milk that is creamier than standard 4%; I don’t know how widely available it is, if you can’t get it then use 4% whole milk

Method

1. Put the milk, egg yolks and sugar into a pan.

2. Heat whilst whisking constantly, until a custard is formed and a line can be drawn in the mixture on the back of a spoon.

3. Chill; for best food safety use an ice bath to chill to 20C before refrigerating.

4. Rewhisk just prior to churning, and pass mixture through a sieve.

5. Churn according to your ice cream machine’s instructions, stopping at soft serve texture.

6. Freeze for at least four hours and preferably overnight. Before serving, allow about five minutes to warm up.

I’ll be honest: I could tell from the recipe that this wouldn’t be great. It’s not dissimilar in composition to the sherbets, and I knew they were a little icy. But they were meant to be, apparently. Gelato isn’t. If the intention was to make good gelato at home (because remember, home ice cream machines aren’t the problem) then there are differences to be made: for a start using stabilisers to control the ice crystals, along with different sugars because some sugars hold on to more water than others, and therefore prevent that water from becoming ice crystals. But making amazing gelato wasn’t the point for me of this week, it was all about making the gelato that inspired all of my ice cream making. And it achieves that goal very well.