Torrance Kopfer - Making Artisan Gelato: 45 Recipes and Techniques for Crafting Flavor-Infused Gelato and Sorbet at Home

45 Recipes and Techniques for Crafting Flavor-Infused Gelato and Sorbet at Home

TORRANCE KOPFER
Photography by Madeline Polss

To all of my family and especially to Nola

How often do we hear professional athletes, celebrities, or chefs recount how they came into their profession? Quite often it seems their tales inevitably include All my life I wanted to do ... just what they are doing. This is not the case in my story. I didnt set out to own a gelato business. Growing up, I trained as a classical musician, and playing the violin was my thing. Later, I enrolled at a music conservatory in New York, where after two years studying violin performance and conducting, I realized Id rather be a patron of the arts than a starving artist. I opted for an economics degree and pursued a career on Wall Street.

One day, I realized that I was spending way more time on food websites, thinking about food, and talking to people about food, than I was on my actual job. So, I bit the bullet and made a career changeinto the food world.

I bought an existing gelato business in Newport, Rhode Island, primarily for the location and its equipment. I immediately threw out all of their recipes (there was a reason it was for sale), and started to practice making gelato. I studied the craft in Italy and elsewhere in the United States, and I read everything I could about gelato, sorbet, and ice cream. I also tasted a lot of gelato, sorbet, and ice cream and learned to differentiate between the good- and the not-so-good-quality gelato. I reopened the gelato store under a new name, convinced some important folks to buy my gelato wholesale, and suddenly I was in the gelato-making business full-time.

Now my violin mostly gathers dust while I balance writing, surfing, learning to fly, being a good husband, and making the best gelato possible.

If you like ice cream but have never made it from scratch, I hope this book inspires you to try it. In selecting these recipes, I wanted to incorporate enough that seemed familiar and would not feel intimidating while still offering plenty of choices for more novel, less traditional fare. The Ingredients and Equipment chapters list all the basic requirements of gelato making, while the Techniques chapter offers step-by-step instructions for the main procedures for any gelato or sorbet recipe.

The chapter on pairing flavors and creating winning combinations touches on my suggestions for how to combine flavors in the hopes of giving you confidence to use your own imagination and creativity in the kitchen. Remember, gelato is really all about having fun while creating a tasty, frozen treat!

The word artisan has, to some degree, been hijacked by marketers attempting to sell inferior-quality goods at premium-quality prices. The values of an artisan must inform the creative process from inception through completion, whether we are shaping clay or making gelato. Artisanal means not taking shortcuts for conveniences sake, and not purchasing inferior ingredients to save a few penniesit is deciding at every stage to place quality before all. If quality is always paramount, quality will always show in the results.

Torrance Kopfer

Before beginning any new endeavor, it is helpful to understand the elementary information about that particular subject. This section of the book contains exactly those fundamentals that may be useful when making gelato.

merges ingredients and equipment and includes in-depth instructions for turning simple ingredients into finished gelato.

explores the types of gelato flavors that go well together, introduces theories on flavor and flavor combinations, and advises on where to find unusual flavor combinations.

Whether you are an experienced cook or relative beginner, reading through this entire section is a good idea. It will familiarize you with all the essentials before you immerse yourself in part 2, The Recipes.

The word gelato is derived from the Italian verb gelare, meaning to freeze. It is no surprise that the Italians are most often credited with the invention of modern-day gelato, which traces its origins to the court of the Medicis, and to Catherine de Medici in particular.

Legend has it that a chicken farmer by the name of Guiseppe Ruggieri first submitted sorbetto to the Medici court in a cooking contest. He concocted it from old and almost forgotten recipes and a hearty dose of his own creativity. Catherine was so enamored of the sweet, icy treat that in 1533 she took Ruggieri to France, where she soon married Henry, Duke of Orleans, and introduced the frozen treat to the French nobility. (This is where sorbetto came to be known as sorbet.)

Slightly later in the same century, a Florentine architect named Bernardo Buonatali improved on the creation by developing a method for freezing a mixture of zabaglione and fruit and served his specialty to Italian and foreign guests visiting the Medici court.

It is yet another Italian, however, who is credited with commercializing ice cream in the late seventeenth century. Using a machine invented by his grandfather, Procopio dei Coltelli combined ice and salt to freeze the dessert. He soon moved to Paris, where in 1686 he opened a shop from which to sell his much-improved version of ice cream. He was granted a special license by the king, which gave him exclusive rights to sell these icy confections. Caf Procope became a popular meeting spot for the literati, and his frozen desserts were the talk of the town.

A GELATO BY ANY OTHER NAME ...

While modern-day sorbet or sorbetto refers to a water-and-fruit-based mixture, historical references seem to use gelato and sorbet interchangeably. In fact, the term gelato is often used in Italy to reference any frozen dessert, whether milk or water based. In the most common modern definitions, gelato refers to milk-based mixtures and sorbet to nondairy gelatos, most commonly flavored with fruit.

Although most food historians can agree on this part of gelatos history, it is gelatos earlier years that remain cloudy. Some historians look to the Old Testament, claiming the cold mixture of goats milk and ice given to Abraham by Isaac is an early reference to ice cream. Other historians look further back in time to an ancient Chinese recipe for cooked rice mixed with milk and other ingredients and buried in the snow to freeze. And what of indications that the Egyptian pharaohs offered guests chalices filled with snow and fruit juices, or that the Roman emperor Nero Claudius Caesar sent slaves to the mountains to retrieve snow and ice to cool and freeze his fruit drinks, or that Marco Polo returned from the Far East with a recipe for making water ices that resemble modern-day sherbets? And where, exactly, did Ruggieri find those old and nearly forgotten recipes for sorbet?