Information on cow milk and Ice cream.

I have endless respect for the majority of cow-dairy farmers – they work so bloody hard. Every day, milking 3 or 4 times a day. Massive amounts of cow to feed and take care of, huge expenses, only one purchaser (Milk Marketing Board), having to hit a specific quota without having too much or too little milk. Most cow dairies are BIG business with a minimum of $3 million in milk sales a year. I respect the job they do.

          I am also a big fan of milk and milk products. I LOVE our goat milk. I eat butter, cheese, yogurt, cream, and kefir, just about every goat/cow product. I like sheep’s cheese, buffalo cheese, and love trying other sources of cheese.

The 1000L tank at our goat dairy (it's tiny!) We had to have it moved in and then finish the building (April 2011)

          My main concern is what happens to the cow milk once it reaches the dairy processing plant. In preparing and planning for our gelato business, Karen (my business partner) took the Dairy Worker Course from BCIT. It was extremely enlightening.

          For example, when cow milk arrives at the dairy plant it is ripped apart, using huge centrifuges, into its component parts. All the cream is taken out, proteins are removed, and everything is broken out. Then, if the plant needs some 2% milk, they put the components back together, they add some whey, some skim milk, some cream, following a formula, finish with adding Vitamin A & D and the whole batch is homogenized to force it all back together. Nothing very natural about this process.

          Commercial ice cream is a matter of following formulas, not about real food. Say you want to make a high end, 10% butter fat ice cream. The legal requirements in calling a product ice cream means that the end product can have only so much emulsifiers and so much chemical additives, so there is 5 % or so, then the legal minimum of actual “re-made milk”, usually skim so they don’t put anything valuable in it. Add artificial flavourings (which is purchased as boxes of syrup), mix, cook, and cool.

Now the fun part. Using a batch freezer, you can whip in as much or as little air as you desire. Therefore, for a higher end product, you would whip in about 60% air. For a cheap ice cream you whip in 200%+  air which means for every 1 litre of base you will get (at least) 2 liters of ice cream, doubling your saleable product.

LegatoGelato doesn’t alter, rip apart, or modify our milk. We use a bucket milking system that doesn’t run the milk thru miles of plastic pipe. From the udder to the sanitized stainless steel bucket is about 6 inches. The stainless bucket is poured gently through a filter into a sanitized bucket and placed in a tank full of very cold/almost frozen water. Then we take it to the Canadian Cultured Dairy Inc plant, pour the milk from the buckets into the large pasteurizing kettle, mixed with gelato ingredients, pasteurized, and poured into different buckets to cool.

We handle the milk gently as it is a delicate product, and we want to preserve the integrity & qualities of it.

The liquid gelato is poured into our batch freezer, gently churned for 7 minutes with only 30% air added to it. If we didn’t add air, you would not be able to eat it – it would freeze into a solid block. We want to balance the rich flavour with spoonability.

Then the frozen gelato is scooped into the pint or single serving containers, sealed, and placed in the freezers, ready to sell to our discerning customers.