The Bravo Trittico which uses the thermal shock process to pasteurize on top and then makes gelato in the bottom chamber.
The short answer is, you can certainly make gelato, but it will not be the best quality you can make, for sure.
Now let's explore the details and understand the 2 ways you can actually use a cold process in your shop.
First, let's start by saying that all our sorbetti (or water based fruit flavors) are all made with a “partial” cold process: I personally always recommend to pasteurize a sugar syrup to use, but it is not necessary. And in fact sorbetti are always the most delicate product in your display case, deteriorating normally much faster than others (unless you use powder mixes and other things meant to extend shelf life). But even here with a pasteurized, or at least cooked, sugar syrup you will greatly improve the texture and stability of your sorbetti.
Pasteurization and especially the aging of your mix is what gives you the most stable, perfect product to start with because this allows all the powders & sugars to be completely melted, the bacteria count to be as low as possible, the proteins and the stabilizers to be fully hydrated and activated and overall it creates the strongest bonds at a molecular level in your base. This cannot be achieved cold or even with a thermal shock process (like using an all in one gelato machine for example - even though this still gives you a very good quality gelato).
Now, the worst cold method you can use are powder mixes, often called "speedy" made by gelato ingredients manufacturers. The whole flavor is in a bag, in powder form (even fruit flavors, so you know there is not even a drop of orange in the blood orange flavor) and these are very cold to the palate, with artificial flavor profiles, not as creamy and overall very very poor product.
The other method is to blend you normal ingredients (if you already buy like most of us pasteurized dairies & cheeses) together cold, blend the proper (for cold use) stabilizer, and then freeze. You must have a very good blender to break down all the powders, melt the sugars and hopefully homogenize a bit your mix and ideally you want to leave it in the fridge for some time to allow the stabilizer & milk powder to fully hydrate. This will give you a very fragile gelato that should be kept in pozzetti and will start to deteriorate much faster than pasteurized gelato. If you sell everything the same day tho this will not be as big of an issue.
Artisan gelato is a delicate balance of many ingredients, both in liquid and solid form, water, sugars, fats and solids therefore the better we can treat them the best product we can make.
I think there is a time and place for cold processed gelato (like touristy areas, extremely high volume shops, places in countries where gelato is not common, at the beginning to save on costs…), but you have to understand that you can certainly do much better :)
One last thought, even in Italy many places work cold....I'll let this sink in for a moment :D - just because you go to Italy you don’t find the best gelato, pizza or pasta everywhere!
What's your choice? Let me know!
Hopefully this was helpful & valuable amici!
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A presto amici!
Vincenzo