WHAT IS OUR GELATO ?

It’s our spiritual offering.

A union of our heart & intellect.

OUR DIFFERENCES

We will use whatever the earth offers, to the best of our ability. It’s the only way we know how to be - to honour the material that’s actually in front of us.

Since we trade fruit with the community in Bermagui, there are weeks when the shop is overflowing with citrus and guavas, not to mention finger limes, cumquats, lillypillies, lemon myrtle. But of course it’s seasonal, so that’s not all year. And not all our fruits are local. Some fruits, we do have to buy. Like mango and strawberries. We get our strawberries from Coldstream, from the son of an Italian immigrant who grows in volcanic soils, not hydroponic. We’re so proud to use their strawberries - no colours, no flavourings.

And every Easter, we make three or four different kinds of chocolate sorbet - one with kahlua, one whisky, one Carolina Reaper chilli, or whatever else is to hand. Experimenting is fun.

And for the big annual Dog Show in February, we do a special, non-dairy ice-cream we call a puppylati.

Everything we do, is different from everything else. After all, every fruit and every nut has a different chemistry and a different texture, not just a different flavour. That means each of them need special attention. We can’t treat them the same way. Our mango has a different texture to our chocolate because they are totally different materials and everyone knows that. The industry standard is to make a single base for all products, to which they add different flavourings and that gives every flavour the same mouth-feel. And maybe that’s not offensive to the customer. But it’s intellectually offensive to an artist and maker.

To get the best out of what each material gives us, we use the absolute minimal industry ingredients. We’ve looked for other products which don’t use fatty acids and stuff like that and replaced them with the simplest possible ingredient.

And even our ingredient list is much shorter than it was a few years ago. Though we can’t get rid of everything commercial.

We use natural gums and starches. They’re important for the feel of the ice-cream. Because water doesn’t mix with vegetable fats and oils, you need the starches so they hug each other properly. The taste will be ok without them, but the mouth-feel needs this help. Same when you freeze it - you need a little bit of starch to help stop it going rock-hard. And mostly we use guar gum and chicory root.

OUR ICE-CREAM MELTS

Yes. Our ice-cream melts. You think that’s funny. But a lot of ice-cream doesn’t melt into a runny mess, it becomes a soft gel or mousse. If you use all those emulsifiers that the industry wants you to use, it just holds its shape. The big give-away, is when the mountain of ice-cream you see in shops, stays a mountain. That’s why ours is in flat tubs. If we tried to make a mountain with it, half of it would melt.

And this is, of course, how gelato used to be made, traditionally, before it became a big industry. 

But nowadays, you have ‘Gelato Universities’ in Italy !  You study how to make ice-cream, like you learn how to be a Barista or a sommelier and so on. There’s a lot of science to get right. And everyone might say they are artisans too. But they don’t use ingredients in a way that proves they really are putting art and science together to make it beautiful — so we are proud to be true artisans.

We MILK THE COWS [ALMOST]

We go to a farm and get milk straight from the cows and use that to make ice-cream. It’s raw. Unpasteurised. Straight out of the vat. And that changes the taste and texture a lot.

Most other small gelaterias have to use pasteurised, homogenised milk — that’s the same milk you buy in the store. And some of them don’t even use fresh milk - just milk powders and add water. But we live in a country area and there are a lot of dairies around. So we got a dairy processing licence, which allows us to use unprocessed milk. In other words we start from scratch.

To get the dairy licence, we had to go through the NSW Food Authority. It’s a long process! We had to set up a manual that identifies the risks and outlines the hygiene process in detail. We even had to write that up from scratch too, because there wasn’t a template anywhere — apparently there was no other specialised gelateria in all of NSW, doing this when we started. So the Food Authority would come and audit us constantly, to make sure we were during the right thing. And it actually took years, to evolve the manual to where it is. And it was really expensive because they would charge by the hour to go through and check the manual we wrote. But in the end, we got 5 stars and A1 ranking. Really good.

Then, during the Covid lockdown, they asked us to send them the manual. Later, we found out that another dairy decided they wanted to set up their own process to pasteurise their milk and sell direct to public instead of wholesale. So they called up the Food Authority and found out a manual exists and downloaded it. That was our manual!

Anyway, being able to pasteurise our own milk changes everything. It means our milk is just pasteurised once. Not twice, like other gelaterias who have to process their previously processed milk. And we don’t homogenise at all. That means the fat polymers are not all chopped up by the homogenisation process. Or hardened by repeated heating. They stay more tender, so you don’t actually need to add as many gums and so on, to keep everything harmonious in your mouth.