What is a balancing method?
A method of balancing comes from tests and retries, often you go wrong, an ice cream that does not come out as you would like and that you want to improve.
The goal of a balancing is to create homogeneous, spatulable, creamy recipes with the correct sweetness, that of creating unique, creative and modern taste recipes.
The earliest and most famous is the Caviezel balancing method , an absolute source of inspiration to which I owe so much of my knowledge.
For those who do not know it, the Caviezel method was the first theory on balancing ingredients for the preparation of ice cream recipes, introduced in 1971 by Prof. Luca Caviezel in his lectures at the CAPAC (Milan Polytechnic of Commerce) and then canonized in the book “Science and technology of artisan ice cream” in 1986.
It is a milestone in the history of Italian gelato but it suffers over time and the change in tastes and the market.
In addition to having a long process with many steps to obtain a recipe, sugar balance is too little elastic depending on the ice creams you want to make. In fact many problems in obtaining a homogeneous spreadability is given by the bad balance of sugars, some of which are to be excluded for certain types of ice cream.
My experience with ice cream balance
There are those born with the shirt … I was born with the gelatiera. I started making ice cream following the recipes developed in the family ice cream shop, developed in over 30 years of experience through endless attempts and errors.
However, when I started to deal with ice cream in a professional way, I wanted to create innovative recipes , tastes that could not be found at the ice cream shop next door, and I studied all the existing balancing methods, reading books and attending professional courses. on purpose.
The results, however, were disappointing, combining these new proofs with the tastes in ice cream parlors – that to be balanced (according to the classic methods) seemed to care very much – the new tastes were not very successful: the taste was interesting, but they lacked creaminess and the sweetness was excessive for my customers’ palate .
Comparing myself with colleagues I discovered that they too had similar problems, it seemed impossible to obtain a similar consistency between the different types of ice cream following the rule the canonical balances. Each ice cream maker then proceeded to develop his adjustments, basically proceeding by trial and error.
Presenti’s Balancing is born
I remember the summer of 2007 very well, I started taking the recipes we did with my parents, and breaking them down. I immediately noticed that the parameters we used were totally different from the Caviezel balancing method.
Thinking about it later it’s obvious, the taste, the sweetness over the years has changed and it was normal to see these results.
Once I had separated all my recipes, I went to identify objective parameters that would allow them to:
- Spread the ice cream at a single temperature, a delicate work between the PAC, the water present in the recipes and the fats.
- Give flavor to ice cream and cremosite with fats, then code based on the family of ice creams we want to make, quantity and quality of fat to use.
- Incorporate air into ice cream and reduce the relative sweetness of modern ice cream.
- Correctly stabilize the ice cream creams, fruits, Vegan etc to have a stable product over time without emulsifiers and thickeners.
All this to conceive a 100% natural ice cream good and tasty, light at the same time and without defects in structure and texture .
It was a full immersion of months in the laboratory, followed by a long confrontation with the colleagues I valued most, to get to formalize the initial balancing schemes.
Later, when I was sure of the “on the field” operation of the method the schemes were revised and integrated with every type and variety of ingredients, with the fundamental help of food chemistry experts that helped us to fully understand how to properly stabilize ice cream.
Now it’s all for you!
Already from the first Basic Course of Natural Gelato all this experience will be transmitted to you and you will become the master of a scientific, synthetic and immediately applicable method for transform every idea into an original recipe with no margin for error.
It is an ambitious statement, but I can guarantee that no one has ever come out dissatisfied with our courses. Many indeed tell us that the price is very low for the value of what was learned, both in ability and in differentiation from the “artisan-industrial” ice cream parlors. But that’s okay with us, spreading the art of making delicious ice cream with only natural raw materials, seeing the success of new Masters of Natural Ice Cream take the name of Italian Gelato high in the world is our reward.
