If there are the Frequently Asked Questions from the ice cream customers to the ice cream makers, the top two would be “How do you create ice creams?” and “What is the difference between Italian Ice Cream or gelato to ice cream?” The simples answer for the ice cream question would be to pour the ice cream base to the ice cream machine and hit the on button.
On the other hand, for the gelato vs ice cream question, the answer would be the three factors: Serving temperature, air and fat. However, if you want an answer that is more complicated and more complete, then you can say that the Italian ice cream is food and not phylogeny. Of course this answer would only raise hundreds of other questions.
The American style ice cream is made of egg yolks, no matter they are homemade or commercial products. This makes the ice cream has lots of fat. On the other hand, gelato contains less fat in the base and also less air when churned during the freezing process. The heavy cream in the American ice cream will make the ice cream labeled with at least 10% fat content.
As 10% is among the lowest number, it is very common to find ice creams both homemade and commercial products to have higher fat content. On the other hand, gelato does not use so much cream as they use milk. And milk does not have as much fat as cream. There are cases, when gelato is using a little egg yolks although fewer than when used by ice cream.
The American ice cream uses plenty of air because it is churned fast and hard. The process is called overrun. This is needed in order to process the high number of cream contains in the ice cream base. The high end ice creams from those prestigious brands averagely have an overrun percentage of 25%. This means that they are receiving the increase as much as 25% in the volume.
The lower end ice cream will have an overrun percentage of 50% which means that we are eating 50% air when eating an ice cream. The lower the price, the higher the overrun number would be. The highest one can be as high as 90%. The more the number is the thinner, lighter, easy to melt and not very flavorful. Of course it is not, when you are biting to the air, do you think that you will taste anything?
