Italian Gelato vs Ice Cream: what are the differences? #gelato #italianfood

We sell gelato because it's a fresh product. It's an extremely fresh product. What do you think is the main challenge for someone who wants to start learning to make gelato? It's a job, a profession that has to be done with your head, with your heart, with your heart and with your head. What's the difference between Italian gelato and ice cream? And why is it important for you to know the difference? Let's do it. Okay, we're approaching his workshop. This is the guy. This is Riccardo. Hello, Marco. How are you doing? Great to see you again, my man. So, we're here with Riccardo. He's going to show us the difference between Italian gelato and, let's say, American ice cream. Ice cream and gelato are not even friends. Oh, really? No, they are faraway cousins. Because if you speak in terms of how you produce it, how you sell it and why you make one product or another one, it's completely different. We sell gelato because it's a fresh product. It's an extremely fresh product. It is stocked at a certain temperature. And we want to sell it as fresh as possible because you have to consume it as soon as possible. And it's from an artisan, a real artisan, with fresh ingredients and some proportion. Which is you. Which is me, actually. You are the artisan. What do you think is the main challenge for someone who wants to start learning to make gelato? The most difficult thing. Well, the most difficult thing is that you have to understand gelato. You have to comprehend. You have to study it. It's not that you can combine some random ingredients and you make it. You have really to study and understand physically and chemically all the ingredients that combine together. If you really understand that, the more you understand, the harder it becomes. How long does it take for the whole process? Since the beginning until, okay, the gelato is ready, it can be served. Well, we have to make the base first, which is something we use for every ice cream of every gelato we make, every cream. You have to prepare, you have to pasteurize a milk base, which takes four to six hours to get the major point, the best point you can use it. And then you make your mixtures for different flavors and it takes about five, ten minutes and other five, ten minutes in the machine and you have your ice cream ready, your gelato, actually. I'm here with Piero, who's the owner of the Gelato Shop and I'm going to talk in Italian now, kind of like subtitles. Piero, I'm thinking, how was this shop born? How did it start? This shop started because I am the son, grandson and great-grandson of the Gelatieri Lucchesi. I was practically in my dad's arms, who already made ice cream. Here we have Caroline, my wife, my great-grandmother, who is basically the pillar of our little ice cream shop. So you have just milk here. We use very few whipped cream, for example, because we want to keep our fat, total fat, between 5%, 4%, 5% to 9%, which is optimal. But you can have much more fat and much more sugar in the ice cream, which makes the product a little bit heavier. This is the Caravaggio. A few years ago, the city of Lucca decided to dedicate an exhibition to the great painter. This exhibition lasted for a year and together with Caroline we decided to dedicate this taste to Caravaggio. A base of nougat with a light tip of orange, then covered with a hazelnut cream. I want to taste this. Go. This can be tasted. Let's taste this right away. This seems to me the most interesting. Go. Do you like cone or cup? Cup. Do you eat ice cream? Yes. Go. Great. It's great. Excellent. Balance. An important difference is the air, for example. Air is one of the four basic ingredients necessary, mandatory ingredients for ice cream. We can have a percentage of air respect of the whole volume of the mixture, which is around 25% of volume for sorbets and 35% for cream. But in the ice cream, they inflate the air. They inflate this air and the percentage in the ice cream arrives to more than 100-150%. So the structure is going to be completely different, for example. So you're breathing air when you buy ice cream? Yeah, basically, yeah. How did you start making gelato? What was the thing that made you think, yes, I want to work on this? Well, I started making ice cream because my family, since a century ago, started to make gelato. My grandfather, yeah. And my grandfather was one of the associates of Saba, which was a huge company back in the days, in 1930, 1940 in Florence. And he used to collaborate with Badiani, which is another great name in the gelato business, which actually you can find it today. So I just followed this passion from my grandfather and started to make ice cream. The starting was really humble, if we can say that, because I started in a very small shop in Florence. Then I recommend you to do a second season to sell the gelato. It is certainly a profession that gives a lot of satisfaction, but it requires everything from you. And the work is made of daily challenges. But you must always try to have ambition. The ambition is within ourselves. It is a profession that must be done with the head, with the heart, with the heart and with the head. The passion is matured within ourselves, but always nourished with the desire to do well, or even better, to improve. Well, thank you, Pero. Thank you very much for the conversation. Great ice cream. Thank you also for the ice cream. Good work. See you next time. Bye.