Yvonne Irnich dips a blender the size of a jackhammer into a bucket full of milk, salt, sugar, coffee and goodness.
“For strong women,” she jokes, as she manhandles the powerful device.
Moments later, she’s poured the earthy concoction into the top of a tall steel box, which grinds, clatters and howls to life once she closes its clear plastic lid and pushes some buttons. In about 25 minutes, she’ll open a valve on the front so the machine can barf out a rich, brown, coffee-flavoured goop called gelato.
Irnich, 46, runs DaVinci’s Gelato, the newest food truck in St. Albert. She’s also, as far as she knows, the only commercial manufacturer of gelato in town.
“I love gelato, but I could not find our European-style gelato here,” she says.
She had learned to make and sell the cool treat from a master gelato artisan in her native Germany 25 years ago, but set aside her ice-cream scoop soon after when she married her husband, Johannes. The two of them spent the next 25 years or so in the construction business and moved to St. Albert three years ago.
“I reached the point where I just didn’t want to do it anymore,” she says, so she decided to go back to her first love: gelato. She started her food-truck business back in May, and is now a regular presence at the St. Albert Farmers’ Market and in front of St. Albert Centre.
On a busy day, such as at the recent Father’s Day food truck rally at the grain elevators, she’ll sling up to 60 kilograms of gelato, in single, double, or triple scoops, sometimes with fruit, whipped cream or waffle accoutrements.
“Six hours, we were constantly serving gelato.”
Gelato is an Italian variant of ice cream that’s popular in Germany, Irnich says – there’s practically a gelato stand every 500 metres there. It has more sugar and less butterfat and air than North American ice cream, making it denser and giving it a more intense flavour.
“The American ice cream I find is too hard,” she says – you practically have to bite chunks off of it. Gelato, in contrast, melts in your mouth.
Making it is a relatively simple process, she explains. She combines different amounts of sugars, salts, milk, and milk powder with flavour ingredients, such as strawberry, chocolate or coffee, and pours the mess into the gelato maker.
The gelato maker mixes, freezes, and, in the case of milk-based mixes, pasteurizes the concoction and spits it out the front into a bin. Lactose-free mixes – – typically fruit-based – take about 15 minutes, while milk-based ones take 25 due to the pasteurization.
Finished gelatos go into a tall freezer full of steel tubs of the stuff. After many minutes spent flushing the machine with water and cleaning her tools, Irnich is ready for the next bunch.
It takes about a day-and-a-half to make a freezer-load of gelato, about half of which she’ll use in a day in the truck, Irnich says. Chocolate takes the longest, since she has to make the chocolate first, and is generally the last batch she makes. It’s also her most popular flavour.
“I only use natural ingredients,” she says, which means no artificial colourings or flavours. She’s looking to bring in more flavours such as apple and stracciatella, which involves melted chocolate, but right now is limited by the size of her truck.
Irnich says St. Albert has a strong European flavour to it, and seems to have a taste for gelato.
“Every time we go out, we get more customers.”
Irnich says she hopes to get a permanent storefront so she can offer more flavours at once. She’s not sure how business will go in the winter, but notes that industry statistics suggest that winter is when gelato sales typically peak.
Irnich says it’s fun and easy to make gelato, and that she has no trouble spending hours making and serving it.
“Seeing them enjoy it, that is my biggest reward.”
