From skis to the opening of three ice cream shops in Rome: “Beyond the classic tastes”
Originally from South Tyrol, born in 1980, he was a ski instructor and he met Iris, the Roman girl he would later marry, right on the snow,. Thus, Günther Rohregger moved to the Capital where he began working in his wife’s family ice cream shop. Everything goes on until 2012, when he opens “Punto Gelato”, the first of his ice cream shops.
Is there a tasting method to identify a good ice cream?
“Choose what you like. There is no real tasting: it is not like wine that has different ways of making wine. A proper crafting, an excellent raw material and each product that is recognisable, all together help the palate to make comparisons”.
What kind of machinery do you use for your production?
“There are three types of ice cream processing: an ancient one with salt and ice, another with a vertical machine and the other is horizontal. In the first method, the oldest one, it takes one hour to make one kg of ice cream: you put the ingredients in the wood with salt and ice, and then inside the tanks with ice or snow, as the ancient Romans used to. For the other two machines, vertical and horizontal, they are both excellent from the point of view of processing”.
How do the most bizarre tastes come about, like the cigar one?
“I wanted to differentiate the industrial product from the artisan one, because I didn’t want to always make the Fiordilatte or other classics. Everything started one evening, while I was sipping a whiskey with chocolate and an excellent cigar. Hence, I thought that I ought to replicate the taste I had in my mouth even with an ice cream. I started doing never-ending tests, infusions of cigars combined with the taste of chocolate. After a few months, I finally managed to replicate that same flavour that I had only idealized months before.”
What about wine ice cream?
“We do the pasteurization of the ice cream first, and halfway in the freezing process I add about 30-35% of wine, so the alcohol content is not too intrusive. Talking about the kind of vine involved in the process, I would rather use a sweet wine, because sparkling wines or red wines are more complicated, but not impossible. With some companies from Latium we were able to produce even 14 different tastes”.
Usually, a master ice cream maker hasn’t the same appeal as a pastry chef or a chef. Why?
“Ice cream is still seen as a children product or just something to cool off. It is not considered as a dessert. The fact that master ice cream makers aren’t on television, unlike pastry chefs or chefs, doesn’t help this profession to rise”.
