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Gelatorama
We spent Thursday at Gelato U, learning some things from the gelato equipment manufacturer Carpigiani, near Bologna. What did we learn? Hard to say. In a course really designed for companies who’d bought the incredibly expensive (25,000-35,000 euros for the basic gelato maker) equipment, we were given recipe after recipe for making four or five kilos of gelato at a time.
The instructor began with some distinctions between “ice cream” and “gelato”. Ice cream, he said, was made in high volumes, and so could not use fresh ingredients, but tended to use industrial flavourings. Gelato on the other hand, could be and was made artisanally (his definition of artisanal: not necessarily made at home, or even by hand, but in small quantities), with fresh ingredients. Another main difference was the over-run, which was 100% in ice cream and more like 45-50% in gelato; this turned out to mean the volume of air pumped into the final product by the industrial — err, artisanal? mixer/freezer. And a final difference was the fat and sugar ratio: gelato is lower in fat but higher in sugar than ice cream. He observed that higher fat doesn’t automatically result in a softer product, since fat freezes solid, so the serving temperature will have more to do with its texture than anything.
After dutifully noting all that down, we had to wonder anew what was really meant by ‘fresh ingredients’ when we watched the making of gelato. Yes, fresh fruit was used. But so was a powder which included stabilisers and emulsifiers, and protein, in the form of milk powder. And we were told that although fresh milk is a good ingredient, you could as easily use UHT or sterilised milk. To add fat, you could use fresh cream, but you could also use butter (as long as it was industrially-produced butter, made by centrifuge, and not the lower-tech kind made by skimming, as this could introduce bacteria into the mix). And all kinds of calculations come in when adding sugar: dextrose, sucrose, fructose all have different degrees of sweetness which must be balanced with the sugars introduced by fruit or other flavourings. The instructor spoke fondly of the companies who have laboured long to save the gelato maker the toil and trouble of crushing his own pistachios, and produced a neat tin of flavouring ready to pour. Here we see a nice can of hazelnut going into the mix.
The original gelato recipe, which originated (in Italy!) consisted of: milk, sugar and egg yolks. Apparently eggs are not used much now, because they make the gelato taste, well, eggy. Which is apparently a bad thing when you want to make it taste of many other things. So, gelato makers have isolated the functions that eggs served (fat to add texture and bind ingredients, protein to add structure, emulsification to smooth things out) and introduced powdered substances that may include alginates, pectins, starches, xanthan gum, gelatin, lecithin, guar gum and carageenan (identified by E numbers). The one gelato flavour that is still allowed to taste, or at least look, eggy is Crema, which is really only ‘custard’ flavour, and I had to wonder if fresh eggs are ever involved…
We sampled both sorbet (below, in lemon) and gelato (above, chocolate). In the demonstration we saw, the mix for the gelato needs to be ‘aged’: the milk, cream, stabilisers, emulsifiers, protein and sugars are combined, heated to 85 degrees celcius and then cooled, ideally overnight, before adding flavourings. This improves the texture, allows the mixture a longer shelf life (three days) and improves the flavours. Quite, well, all those powders after all; we did not learn whether if you used old fashioned ingredients like milk, eggs and sugar, the flavours would meld without aging.
A few other distinctions we learned: sorbet (sorbeto, sorbetto) is gelato made with water instead of milk; granita is gelato without the air (from mixing), stabiliser and emulsifier (it’s slush, basically); and semi-freddo (aka gelato caldo or gelato alto) is made with vegetable fat. Not sure about the last definition; I think the term semi-freddo, or indeed semifreddo, is used differently by different people: I’ve seen it used for various frozen desserts.
The verdict? Disappointing. The flavours ranged from bland to unbalanced, the texture fatty. The words “artisan-made gelato” will not impress any of us in future, since all they mean (as in fact we’d heard as well from another of our lecturers) is that the seller has mixed his batch of formula, from what we know now are bags of stabilisers and powdered milk, and poured it into his expensive machine in small quantities, and put it into the display case at what we hope are frequent intervals. The skill, I suppose, lies in the chemical skills of the mixer, the kind of milk and cream used, and the intensity, purity and freshness of the flavourings. Further research at Grom, K2 and other favourite outlets will be needed. We are all off to Piemonte next week and I hope will have occasion to revisit the excellent cafe/gelateria in Bra that we stopped in on a cold day back in March, which features some dazzling Presidia flavours.
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We cook lunch
Having spent the weekend in the environmental vale of despond, we faced Monday with chef Barny Haughton, who talked about the efforts he and his more-than-a-restaurant Bordeaux Quay are making to live and work sustainably, modelling good behaviour as a restaurant and educational body. They aim to be carbon neutral within five years, having already invested in sustainable infrastructure and culinary techniques and following local food procurement policies (“if it grows in the West Country”, he says, “we don’t buy it elsewhere”).
Tuesday, we all cooked together under Barny’s watchful hand, becoming one happy appetite making a communal lunch. We had been sent to the morning market to come in with a vegetable (or something) to contribute, and we had quite a feast: stuffed mushrooms, risotto milanese (made with fresh chicken stock), saltimbocca with salsa verde (with fresh herbs, anchovies, mustard, lemon, olive oil) aubergine towers, aioli with crudites, and a zucchini frittata.
In the process of making saltimbocca Barny explained a bit about the veal education campaign, which is to try to communicate to people who drink milk or eat cheese that they are actually forcing the production of veal, which it has become unfashionable to eat. If they then refuse to eat it, you end up with the situation as it is in England where the calves that are needed to initiate milk production are either shot and buried on the farm or shipped to Italy. This is not to minimise the brutality that has been exercised on veal calves in the past, but to say that veal is to beef what lamb is to mutton; people who eat lamb without qualm should be equally prepared to eat veal rather than perpetuate the waste of life that exists now amongst a confused public.
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More anthropology, and the décroissance finale
Friday morning’s lecture was based on a couple of readings we’d done: one on punk food culture in Seattle, and the other on fast food outlets in China (Of hamburger and social space: Consuming McDonalds in Beijing). A lot of interesting stuff came out of it. We started with Lévi-Strauss’s culinary triangle, which places the concepts of cooked, raw and rotten at its points; the discussion was about what those ideas represented in a counter-culture which had quite naturally (being counter-culture) adopted opposites, so was raw (vegan) instead of cooked (processed, industrialised, omnivorous) and included rotten (foods retrieved from supermarket dumpsters or stolen from markets). And for the second article we talked about it in the context of Sidney Mintz‘s observation that eating differently transforms you – so to eat like an American in Beijing provided a kind of local version of cultural transformation.
In the afternoon we had the second half of the décroissance lecture, and the theories and political actions needed to counteract it. It was a little disappointing to learn there were no simple, effective solutions to a problem that’s been growing since the industrial revolution. The complexity of the economic rat’s nest that holds it all together is not likely to be untangled with a single stroke. Too many vested interests, too many power relationships. A population too tied to the comforts, rules and products of a growth economy, and too unaware or unwilling to see our individual connection to the larger problem.
And an infrastructure that doesn’t support it. It may be possible to live – as I did for 13 years – without a car in a city with a large public transport system; but if you live in a small town, for example, how do you manage? There are towns in every country that have no public transportation, or transportation that runs once a day or less. So people who move to the country to live a healthier life or be greener often find they use their cars far more than they ever did in city life: they are likely to get less exercise than they would in a city where they had to walk between transport stops or were able to use bike lanes rather than risk their lives on narrow country roads. What does that do to the environmental balance I wonder.
And as for downshifting our lives: it all sounds good. We should be wasting less, polluting less, growing more of our own food. But do the people who live in tower blocks have that option or is it reserved for those who can afford the luxury of a house with a garden?
What do we do with all those people living in urban centres, who are there after all because there simply isn’t enough land for them to have their own patch?
Or with those who are a couple of generations beyond having learned to cook their own bread, sew their own clothes or repair furniture –which nowadays is made of self-destruct particle board? Who maybe have to hold two jobs just to pay the rent and feed their children and haven’t the luxury of stepping off the merry-go-round in order to learn how to cook anything from scratch instead of buying frozen pizzas and processed foods, let alone why it should matter to the rest of the world what and how they eat?
We received this interesting link from a Unisg alumnus: What the World Eats is somewhat terrifying when you look at the amount of processed and packaged foods on everyday tables around the world.
Well, on with the show. Today we have a first meeting with Barny Haughton, of Bordeaux Quay, Bristol, talking about culinary techniques; later in the week we’ll have the Austrian-born American physicist (author of The Tao of Physics) Fritjof Capra.
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In her latest collection, Rhona McAdam navigates the dark places of human movement through the earth and the exquisite intricacies lingering in backyard gardens and farmlands populated by insects and pollinators, all the while returning to the body, to the tune of staccato beats and the newly discovered symmetries within the human heart.
“…A beautiful, filling collection, Larder is a set of poems to read at the change of the seasons, to appreciate alongside a good meal, and to remind yourself of the beauty in everything, even the things you may not appreciate before opening McAdam’s collection….”
Rhona McAdam is a writer, poet, editor, and Registered Holistic Nutritionist with a Master’s in Food Culture from Italy and a deep-rooted passion for ecology and urban agriculture. Her work spans corporate and technical writing to poetry and creative nonfiction, often exploring the vital links between what we eat and how we live. Based in Victoria, BC, and available via Zoom, Rhona is always open to new writing commissions, readings, or workshops on nutrition and the culinary arts.
