Skim milk powder is a key component of your gelato base because of the concentration of proteins and its power to absorb free water.
We discussed in a previous post the most common production processes for artisanal gelato. Once you decide you want to open your gelato business, your next decision should be “how will I craft my gelato” and which method I want to follow because this will dictate all your equipment, recipes and training needed.
The traditional method is called “hot process” and it is the one I use in my stores. You’ll need a pasteurizer and a batch freezer, so that you can pasteurize your base and then freeze it.
I like this method because it gives you probably the best results, allows for speedier production and less mistakes. With this method your gelato base becomes the first building block of all your gelato flavors!
Many high volume shops in Italy even make different ones: white (milk & cream), yellow (for flavors with eggs) & chocolate. I do a universal white base that I use in every single flavor of gelato I make along with my own flavoring pastes (egg, chocolate, nuts, cookies..).
So what is this “gelato base”?
For convenience, to speed up production and reduce mistakes we make & pasteurize a large batch of gelato base (60/120 liters) to which we then add the actual flavor/paste and anything else needed to perfectly balance it (generally extra dextrose, or heavy cream depending on the flavor). Gelato companies will sell you “pre-made” gelato bases called Base50, 100, 200, total but what they are is just a mix of all these ingredients I’ll list briefly and you’ll pay top dollars for them.
What’s in it?
In your white, universal gelato base we’ll find all our basic ingredients that are common in each gelato flavor: whole milk, heavy cream, powder milk, sugars (a mix of them), stabilizers/thickeners.
How do we make it?
The beauty of this process is that we scale all the ingredients once, pasteurize them and then we just need to scale the base for each flavor, adding the flavoring paste and batch freeze it. The use of a gelato specific pasteurizer in this step is very important, because it will make your life easier and it’s built for this exact purpose. But any other commercial pasteurizer could be used as well (some of my customers are dairy farms).
We will first add all the milk in the pasteurizer, followed by some of the sugars, we start the “high heat” treatment, and then add at around 30C the remainder of the sugars, and then slowly the milk powder, the cream and as of last the thickener/stabilizer at around 50C. In this process we’ll make sure to mix part of the regular sugar with other lighter sugars (like glucose for example) and also with the stabilizer/thickener (to avoid lumps) and pour slowly in the pasteurizer as we go to avoid, again, the formation of annoying lumps. The pasteurization process takes it then to 85C and cools it down in about 70 minutes to a fridge temperature. The pasteurizer then holds it there for you, cold, and perfectly blended. At this point a critical stage of the process begins, which is called aging: the base will sit resting for 4-6 hrs at least (normally overnight, so we make it the night before for next day) so that all the proteins and stabilizers can hydrate properly, giving you the best possible results.
The gelato base will be around 70-80% of your final gelato flavor, so having a perfectly balanced base is critical to a good gelato. This is why in our trainings we customize a gelato base for your needs so that even if you make some mistakes in your recipes you’ll never be too off and it will be an easy fix. This and many others are the vantages of taking a true professional approach to gelato making!
Hopefully this was helpful & valuable amici!
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A presto amici!
Vincenzo