Aug 14, 2009

What is butterfat? Is it true that I get gelato when I cut down the amount of butterfat?


Butterfat is derived from whipping cream and full cream milk. It is one of the main substances that makes ice cream, well, ice cream.

Ice cream should have at least 10% of butterfat in its content, which explains why ice cream has a rich creamy taste and texture. (Although not everyone (expert ice cream makers included) can agree at what minimal level of butterfat content ice cream should contain before ice cream ceases to be ice cream. This is more of a philosophical question, like "When does a tree cease to be a tree? When it loses all its leaves? Its branches fall off? It loses its bark? Its trunk?")

So what if there is lesser butterfat when you intentionally cut it out of ice cream? Well, technically, you might think you get gelato as gelato contains about 7% butterfat. However, the catch is that you cannot say you have created gelato just by cutting down on the amount of butterfat content.

There are simply too many other factors to consider. This is so as gelato can have a higher sugar content as compared to ice cream (to compensate for the lack of butterfat among other reasons), but it is a fact that gelato has a denser consistency due to lesser air being incorporated into it (up to 50% less than ice cream, some might say).

Simply put, ice cream and gelato are made differently, and the difference in butter fat is just one difference.

But you can always try it out on your own. Experiment making ice cream with half the required amount of whipping cream and what you have is definitely not ice cream and definitely not gelato either.

So the one thing you can take away from this is: Reducing the butterfat from ice cream DOES NOT automatically give you gelato. You need to take other factors of ice cream and gelato creation into consideration.

You can read more about the difference between ice cream and other frozen desserts here.

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