What is Gelati?

So what is this stuff anyway?

Gelato (gelati is pluaral) is an Italian style of ‘ice cream’.  It is made with milk instead of cream, it is extremely thick and rich (like old fashioned ice cream from the farm, not something fluffy from the factory), and it is generally made with intense, natural flavours.

Sorbets are frozen fruit juices and purees.  They are fat free, dairy free, and the most thirst quenching blats of frozen freshness you will ever taste!

Why make it your self?

All it took was one taste, and Gerry knew that his beautiful hometown of Invermere, BC clearly needed gelato!  And not just any gelato- it had to be the best!  It had to be made with the highest quality ingredients (no plant fats or corn syrup solids here), and it had to be prepared in small batches- right in Invermere.  So, like most things, if you want it done right, you might just have to do it your self… and Gerry did, and has been since May of 2004.  Gerry has had time to perfect a few flavours, and is proud to invite you to enjoy locally produced fine frozen desserts!

How do you make it???

To make the gelati (the milk based one), we start by making what we call our "base".  What is unique, we make our base from scratch.  Unfortunately a lot of gelato shops use a prepared powdered bases that are full of artificial ingredients and preservatives.

Our gelati base is made with 2% milk, a tiny bit of cream, sugar, skim milk powder, and natural stabilizer (main ingredient is egg yolk powder).  Crazy- you can pronounce all of those words! We then heat everything up to 85 C to dissolve all of the solids and enhance the flavour.  We then cool everything down to below 4 C- and then we can begin making the gelati! 

Our method of heating and then cooling is called pasteurization (although we use already pasteurized milk) or a hot method.  Unfortunately, a lot of gleato shops use a cold method- where they attempt to stir solids into cold milk.  The end result will be gritty- and not as smooth and tasty as our gelati!

We then take our gelati base and either add liquid flavour, a concentrated paste, or the real ingredients (ie coco powder, or bananas)- blend it all up with a super high power immersion blender, and then pour it into our special gelati "batch freezer" (the machine pictured above).  Its kind of like a soft ice cream machine, except it only does one batch or dose of product at a time- and is designed to whip only a small amount of air into the gelati.

The thickness and density of gelato is part of why people love it- but often people mistake that for creamyness.  There is a big difference between creamy and thick.  Creamy often taste buttery, and coats your tongue- the more milk fat can actually dull flavours, and even make you feel kind of ill after consuming it.  Thick- means its smooth and real- really solid mouth feel- you are tasting the real stuff, not something that is super fluffy and air filled. 

Sorbets are made with the real fruit!  That's right, for lemon we squeeze lemons, for rapsberry we use real raspberry.  We even make rhubarb sorbet when people bring us rhubarb from their garden!

In addition to the fruit, we use sugar, water, and a stabilizer derived from sea weed.