PUNTOITALY N°1 -January - June 2012

THE ITALIAN MAGAZINE FOR INTERNATIONAL BUYERS IN GELATO, CONFECTIONERY AND TRENDY FOOD-AND-DRINK 31 WHERE DOES THE MIX COME FROM? You can do it yourself, you will only need a pot, then melt the ingredients and let them cool down. Or you can buy the good powder products on the market that you just need to dissolve in cold milk or water and the mix is ready to use. Even faster are the UHT mix, sealed in Tetrapack, and good scissors are the only tool you need. It doesn’t matter what you choose, you can achieve a good result anyway, but please keep an eye on the price. Maybe it is worth mentioning that cheap products will give you poor soft ice cream, and when you are saving money on the qual- ity of the mix, you are actually losing money. Remember that ice cream is a pleasure, not a necessity and for this reason it must be good, or you won’t take anymore. On the market you can find many different powder and UHT mixes for all kinds of customers – it’s you that decides. AIR IS GOOD The more air you put in, the better taste you get. Don’t worry sirs, air is free and will make your soft ice cream tasty. Air makes it less cold because the cold is spaced out in a larger volume. If you have the chance to talk with a technician he will immediately say the word “overrun”, because it is always cool to use technical terms. And depending on which com- pany he works for he will start to explain that the machine with the pump can get an higher overrun compared to the one without. This is absolutely true but doesn’t mean that It’s fantastic when you see it coming out of the machine, and it so fast that you don’t mind the queue. without the pump you can’t get a good soft ice cream - what you put inside is much more important... What you should keep in mind is that, as we said, air doesn’t cost at all and by using a machine with a pump, you will get more money. The reason is simple: the overrun is the amount of air that your mix can get inside, e.g. a machine with the pump can give you an overrun of 60%, this means that from 1 l of mix you get 1.6 l of soft ice cream, that is 16-20 cones. Without the pump the overrun is lower, aroud 30-40%, depending on the mix com- position - this will mean 12-15 cones per liter of mix.