Take 600 eggs......

We are getting closer to launching our wonderful gelato!

          Karen and I spent a few hours after I finished work yesterday (Wed) mixing up part of our recipe in preparation for making our gelato base. Regulations require we make all the coulis and base mixtures at an inspected commercial kitchen – we rent the kitchen at Lush Valley, a community organization in the Comox Valley.

We are going to be making about 300 litres of the white base. The base is our milk, pasteurized at Canadian Cultured Dairy Inc in Royston, with the rest of the ingredients to make it deletectable. Canadian Cultured Dairy Inc. is the home of Tree Island Gourmet Yogurt, and we have our milk pasteurized and make our gelato there as well.

Construction in process at the Canadian Culture Dairy plant

Once the base is blended, pasteurized, and cooled, we mix in our delicious fruit coulis and chocolate sauces. Then into the batch freezer to mix and freeze.

Karen next to our amazing Gelato batch Freezer.

 

          I have always enjoyed cooking but it is a whole new kettle of fish to make a recipe that starts with 600 large organic hens’ eggs. It takes a fair bit of cracking. We are doing about 1 dozen at a time into a bowl, carefully checking for any shell chips, making sure that all the eggs look good and aren’t too old; then they are poured into the Hobart mixer. We weigh out the organic sugar and put that in, layering it on top of our precious organic cornstarch to keep the cornstarch from becoming a big cloud once the mixer starts. The Vancouver Island Sea Salt is added in with the sugar or cornstarch; it is a very small quantity but important for rounding out the flavour.

          This lovely mix looks like the makings of butter tart filling without any raisins – it’s thick, rich and golden (from the lovely eggs and the tawny brown of the organic sugar). It looks good enough to eat. But I restrained myself.

           I love making our gelato. Every step is putting together lovely, yummy ingredients and making something better. The organic sugar is a gorgeous golden brown and flows like sand on the beach. Our organic hens eggs are a warm brown with tiny dark brown specks on most of them, the yolks’ colour is between a brilliant yellow and a ripe orange. The Ironwood Farm blackberries are so dark that they are also indigo going to black, if they weren’t glossy they would disappear. Beaver Meadow’s cranberries range in colour from a slightly pink tinged berry though the red spectrum to a deep, rich ruby red, like jewels.

 

When the coulis are cooking they have an amazing scent that beats ANY perfume hands down. Its fragrance is mouth watering & practically transcendent. I just have to check the taste by spooning out a bit for myself. The coulis are made from berries, organic sugar and organic lemon juice. We use much less sugar than you would use for jam but its still sweet. The lemon juice gives the coulis a brightness that brings out the sharp notes of flavour in the berries themselves.

 

It's a colourful wonderful adventure in taste and texture. Please join us!