A cup of Stracciatella, a flavor you most certainly would want to master!
I train & work with many gelato professional and business owners and I always say: making gelato from scratch is a science, you must know the raw ingredients, you must understand how they work together when you freeze them and how each one of them will affect the freezing process.
Gelato is not ice cream, you cannot just throw stuff together, put it in the batch freezer and hope for the best!
Right now, in the US & in many other countries, gelato is still a novelty, but many are looking to open more shops and the question is: do you want to be seen as just an expensive ice cream shop because you use pre-made mixes, colorants & flavorings just like ice cream and you don’t know how to do it? Or do you want to make sure that you can differentiate your business for years to come because miles ahead of the local competition with complete customization, a true authentic gelato & total mastering of the product your are selling? If you are a wise business owner the answer is easy: you want to be ahead and to assure your business can thrive, so you have no choice but mastering the gelato making process to assure you can offer the best & most authentic product to your customers. A little sacrifice upfront, will yield big time in the mid-long term!
The first thing you need to understand when creating your gelato recipe is that you must know your raw ingredients and how they affect your gelato! Creating a gelato recipe is a lot of work in Excel (or in specific softwares) and a lot of trial & error in the kitchen to perfect flavor profile, structure and balance.
In gelato making there are 4 main categories in which every single ingredient must be broken down:
Sugars
sucrose for example is 100% sugar, but other ingredients like cookies, Nutella, chocolate have some sugar as well!
Fats
does it contain fat? Cheeses for example are good source of fat, dairies too, as well as nuts & chocolate!
Milk Solids
if the ingredient is a dairy product (milk, cream, cheese, has milk powder..) this category contains everything that is not sugar or fat, like proteins, vitamins, residues…but only for dairy derived ingredients!
Other solids
if your ingredient does not contain dairies (for example cocoa powder, nuts…) then everything else that it contains that is not sugar & fat goes in here! For example fibers, spices, stabilizers and so on!
A single ingredient could fall into one of these categories, two, all of them or none of them: water for example is 100% water!
A good gelato should contain: sugars between 18-22%, fats between 6-10%, milk solids between 9-11% & other solids that varies but all together these 4 categories should not exceed 38-42% of the total solids (all these 4 categories are considered solids). And the rest is water! Yes, you read that correct, gelato is about 60% water that comes mainly from the dairies (milk & cream), and this is normal.
Infact here is the composition of Whole Milk (full fat milk): 0% sugars (lactose is included in Milk Solids), 3.5% fat, 9% Milk solids (vitamins, minerals, proteins & lactose) & 0% other solids (being a dairy product all the solids that are not sugar or fat are under milk solids). As you can see total milk solids are about 12% and the rest 88% is water!
Now, luckily for you I have created charts with most of the ingredients you need, all broken down in these 4 categories so that you just need to plug the values into your recipes & do the math (or let Excel do it for you).
You can request this file here!
If some of your ingredients are not in there you also get to ask me 10 additional ingredients at no extra cost.
A lot of informations about your ingredients can also be found in their nutritional values, and here I discuss a little bit on how to understand these labels for your convenience.
These are the first steps you must do to start understanding your ingredients, start owning the craft and create amazing gelato. I explain the detailed process in my one-on-one classes and soon in an online training video as well!
Do you want to start making your own gelato recipes? Do you want to get ahead of your competition and finally understand the product you want to sell? Send me an email today and let’s talk how I can help you!
See you soon,
Vincenzo