Choosing the Right Gelato Paste: Concentration and Dosage

The dosage figure on a paste tells you more about the product than the name does. A paste dosed at 30 g per kilo and a paste dosed at 120 g per kilo are not two strengths of the same thing — they are different categories of product, priced and formulated differently, and comparing them by the kilo will mislead you every time.

Read the dosage first

Low dosage, roughly 20–50 g per kilo of mix. These are concentrated pastes, usually pure or near-pure. Little more than the flavour material itself, ground. Expensive per kilo, often cheap per litre of finished gelato.

Medium dosage, roughly 50–100 g per kilo. Compound pastes: the flavour material carried in sugar, fat or both. The carrier contributes solids and sugars to your mix, which means it is doing part of the balancing job as well.

High dosage, 100 g per kilo and up. Now you are into products that are substantially carrier — and at the top of the range, into complete bases, where the "paste" is the entire recipe.

The category boundary is not marketing. A pure pistachio paste is ground pistachio; a compound pistachio paste is pistachio plus sugar plus vegetable fat plus, usually, colour. Both are legitimate. They are not substitutes.

The arithmetic that matters

Compare cost per litre of finished gelato, never cost per kilo of paste.

A paste at $60/kg dosed at 40 g per kilo costs $2.40 per kilo of mix. A paste at $28/kg dosed at 120 g per kilo costs $3.36 per kilo of mix — and it also brought its own sugar and fat into your balance, which you now have to account for.

The cheaper tin is the more expensive gelato. This is the single most common costing error we see, and it survives because the invoice shows the price per kilo.

What the carrier does to your balance

A compound paste at 100 g per kilo carrying, say, 50% sugar has added 5% sugar to your mix. That is not a rounding error — it is most of the gap between a correctly balanced gelato and one that will not hold its shape at cabinet temperature.

If you switch from a pure paste to a compound at the same flavour intensity, the recipe has to change. Reduce the added sugar by roughly what the carrier contributes and re-check the total solids. Skipping this step is why a shop changing supplier suddenly finds every flavour softer than it was.

Flavour intensity is not linear

Doubling the paste does not double the perceived flavour. It usually produces a gelato that tastes strong for two seconds and flat afterwards, because the aroma compounds saturate long before the palate does.

More usefully: a well-balanced gelato at the correct dosage tastes stronger than a badly balanced one at twice the dosage, because fat and solids carry aroma. If a flavour reads weak, check the fat content before adding paste.

When the paste is not the answer

Some jobs are not flavouring jobs at all, and reaching for a paste is the wrong move.

For a chocolate soft-serve line, Cioko Soft 400 is a complete base built on skimmed cocoa powder at 350–400 g per litre of water or milk — no separate flavouring paste and no balancing. Using a plain base plus a chocolate paste to reach the same place costs more steps and more room for error.

For visible nut texture, a paste is the wrong physics. Pistachio paste is ground to a butter, so a pistachio gelato made well tastes intensely of pistachio and feels like nothing in particular. Fanta Crumble Pistacchio is layered at 100–200 g per kilo as the tub is filled and restores the bite the paste cannot. It is a texture product, not a flavouring — used alone in a white base it reads as a nut inclusion rather than as pistachio.

For finish and colour on a stick or single portion, Copertura Verde Pistacchio is applied warm at 35–40 °C and sets on contact into a thin shell. That is a coating decision about how the product looks in a cabinet, and no amount of paste in the mix achieves it.

Storage is part of the specification

A paste that has been stored badly is a different product from the one you costed, and nut pastes are the least forgiving of the categories.

The fat in a nut paste oxidises, and oxidised nut fat is unmistakable — it reads as stale and slightly cardboard-like, and no dosage increase recovers it. Heat accelerates it, light accelerates it, and air in a part-used pail accelerates it most of all. A tin opened in November and used down slowly through a hot February will not taste in autumn like it did in spring.

Three habits that cost nothing:

Work from a clean dry utensil, every time. Introducing moisture into a fat-based paste creates a site for spoilage and, in a nut paste, a texture problem.

Do not warm the pail to make it easier to pour. Warmed nut paste loses aroma and does not get it back. If a paste is too stiff to work, the answer is a warmer room for an hour, not a hot-water bath.

Level the surface and reseal. Reducing the exposed area slows oxidation meaningfully, and a paste stored under its own smoothed surface keeps better than one left with a crater in it.

Fruit pastes and chocolate-based products are more robust, but the same rule applies at the top of the Australian summer: cool, dark, sealed, and away from anything strongly aromatic.

Buying questions worth asking

• What is the recommended dosage, and per what? Per kilo of mix and per litre of liquid are different denominators and the confusion is expensive.
• Pure or compound? If compound, what is the carrier and roughly how much?
• What does it cost per litre of finished gelato at your dosage?
• What is on the specification sheet? The ingredient list, the allergen declaration, the shelf life and the storage conditions live there and nowhere else. A catalogue description is not a substitute, and a product name is never an allergen declaration.

That last one is not a formality. If a customer asks whether a flavour contains nuts, the answer comes from the controlled document, not from the label on the tub or from what the flavour is called.

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The 2026 Elenka catalogue lists the cream pastes and fruit pastes with dosage for each, and separates the pure grades from the compound ones — including the PGI Piedmont hazelnut and Etna pistachio lines.