Explainer: Ice cream, gelato, sorbet and granita – the difference between ice desserts
Chefs and ice cream makers break down how fat, sugar and air content shape various frozen desserts, from dense gelato to fluffy soft serve
Ben Ernst remembers making graham cracker ice cream as a child on Whidbey Island, just north of Seattle. A wooden bucket was filled with ice and rock salt, and nestled in the middle was a steel container where cream and the ground-up graham crackers were added. A hand crank moved the dashers that pushed the creamy mixture against the cold sides of the container to chill it, eventually turning it into ice cream.
“Tasting that before it hardens up – when it’s still soft and it’s finished churning, but it hasn’t gone into the freezer yet on a warm summer day outside on the porch. That’s an early childhood memory for me,” he says.
Decades later, Ernst moved further north to Vancouver, Canada. He shared his love of ice cream with the city in 2012 when he and his business partner Erica Bernardi opened Earnest Ice Cream, which creates a range of flavours like salted caramel, whiskey and hazelnut, London Fog and even cream cheese.
While Ernst eats all kinds of frozen treats, from soft serve to gelato, regular ice cream is still his favourite. “I like the richness of it, and the body and the mouthfeel that comes from a product with a little bit higher butter fat,” he says. “We make premium ice cream, which has a higher butter fat, and it may or may not be made with eggs. Ours is custard style, and that contributes to the richness in the mouthfeel as well as having eggs in the mix.”
Gelato Messina is a popular Australian brand that Black Sheep Restaurants brought to Hong Kong in 2021. Samantha Short, head of frozen desserts for the restaurant group, explains gelato is made with more milk, less cream, sugar and generally no egg yolks; ice cream has more fat, while gelato has more sugar.
“You can make gelato with almost any ingredient as long as you maintain a balance between sugar, fat and water,” she explains in an email interview. “Messina has thousands of recipes for gelato, but one of my favourites that is less traditional, yet a Hong Kong classic, is Hong Kong French toast gelato.
“We start with a peanut butter gelato base and fold in maple syrup-soaked French toast bites, which we then finish with sweetened condensed milk whipped cream,” she says.
The brand is so particular about its ingredients that Messina has its own dairy farm, chickens to produce eggs, bees to make honey and a hazelnut farm.