Absurdly Optimized Gelato: A Calculator Built on the Italian Bilanciamento | Absurdly Optimized

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Absurdly optimized gelato

Twenty-two flavours across the three Italian bases, each ingredient sized in grams to the professional bilanciamento: the sugar split between sucrose and dextrose so the gelato is soft without being any sweeter, scoopability derived from the freezing curve and checked against Caviezel’s own measurements, and no stabiliser gum

Ben

Jul 14, 2026<br>Updated

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This is what the arithmetic is for: peach sorbetto, dense enough to tear rather than crumble, glossy instead of icy, and soft straight out of a home freezer. There is no stabiliser gum in it and no dextrose either, because the peach brought its own antifreeze, which took the longest to work out and is the part I am proudest of.

Gelato is churned with far less air in it than ice cream and carries less fat (Caviezel), so the flavour arrives with nothing standing in front of it. A pistachio one tastes overwhelmingly of pistachios; a strawberry one of strawberries, rather than of cold sweet cream. The best I have ever eaten was at Cremeria Cavour in Bologna, and I came home wanting to be able to make it whenever I felt like it. I had by then already researched gelato makers to the point of buying the one that won, a Musso, so I considered the equipment question comprehensively settled. I looked up GialloZafferano’s gelato alla panna and ran a batch through it (GialloZafferano). The texture was perfect. It was also far too sweet.

The starting point: my first batch of GialloZafferano’s gelato alla panna, vanilla flecks and all. Very good, a shade too sweet, and the reason for every gram that follows.

The obvious move is to use less sugar. The obvious move gives you a brick. That is because gelato never actually freezes solid: some of its water turns to ice and the rest stays behind as a cold syrup, and the ratio between the two is what you feel when the spoon goes in. Sugar sets that ratio, because dissolved sugar drops the freezing point, so at any given temperature less of the water has gone over to ice (Caviezel). Which means the sugar in a gelato is holding down two jobs at once, and firing it from one fires it from both.

Finding that out turned into reading a literature I had not known existed, and then into an unembarrassed love for Luca Caviezel’s six hundred and eighty-six pages on the science of artisan gelato (Caviezel, 2016), which is now, straightforwardly, my favourite book. Professionals do not accept that trade; they use two sugars. One of them is dextrose, which I had spent years avoiding on the grounds that it sounded like something out of a factory. It is glucose, the same sugar already sitting in fruit and honey, sold as a white powder because that is what a sugar looks like once you dry it. Per gram it pulls the freezing point down about twice as hard as table sugar and tastes about three-quarters as sweet (Caviezel). So a gelatiere hands part of the sugar’s work to dextrose and the two jobs come apart: the dextrose holds the gelato soft, and the table sugar is left deciding nothing but how sweet it is. The ingredient I had been refusing was the one that would have let me use less sugar.

By then I had a second gelato to chase. Osteria La Sangiovesa is my favourite restaurant in Italy, and its own cookbook prints the gelato di crema it serves (La Sangiovesa), which is a different animal again: no cream in it at all, and enough egg yolk to carry the whole thing on its own. Two gelati, then, and twenty more behind them, each one the same handful of percentages solved over again around whatever it has to dissolve. Doing that by hand, once per flavour, is not a reasonable way to spend an evening. Building something to do it for me took far longer than doing it by hand ever would have, which is obviously the wrong trade, and I would make it again tomorrow: it means the Bologna version is something I can have in February without leaving the house.

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What actually matters

Underneath the flavour, a gelato is a handful of fractions and one curve. Get both right and it comes out denser, colder and more intense than any ice cream, and it melts almost as soon as it lands. Get either wrong and no amount of good milk will rescue it.

The fractions are what the Italian trade calls the bilanciamento, the balance: total solids, sugars, fat, and the milk solids that are not fat, which in Italian are the sostanza secca, the zuccheri, the grassi and the SLNG....