Bases & Stabilisers

The base is the least visible decision in a gelateria and the one that shows up most reliably in the display cabinet three hours into service. A well-chosen base holds its structure; a poorly-chosen one weeps, crystallises, or goes gummy. The customer never sees the product at extraction, when everything looks correct. They see it at four in the afternoon, after the cabinet has been opened two hundred times.

What a base is actually doing

Four jobs, running at once.

It supplies solids. Water is the enemy of texture in a frozen product, and everything that is not water — milk proteins, sugars, fats, fibres — is what gives gelato something to be. A mix that is too dilute freezes into ice with flavour in it.

It sets the freezing curve. Sugars depress the freezing point, so the proportion and the type of sugar decide how much of the water is still liquid at service temperature. That fraction is what makes gelato scoopable at minus twelve rather than solid.

It controls ice crystal growth. Stabilisers — locust bean, guar, tara, carrageenan and the rest — bind free water so that the crystals which form stay small, and so that the crystals which melt and refreeze during a service day do not grow into something you can feel on the tongue.

It manages the emulsion. Emulsifiers hold fat and water together and control how much air the mix will take and hold. Overrun is not just a yield question; it is a large part of what people describe as creaminess.

A base does all four together, pre-balanced. That is its value and also its constraint: buying a base means buying someone else's answer to all four questions at once.

Classifying bases by dosage

Elenka's range splits along a single practical axis: how much of the finished mix the base accounts for. Everything else — hot or cold process, milk or fruit, cream or semifreddo — sits underneath that.

In the Elenka range those bands are populated end to end. At the low end, Technoice runs at 10 to 20 grams per litre and exists to change one property — softness and spatula behaviour in a display well — without disturbing anything else. Pannosa sits at 30, Preziosa P/F 50 and Base Frutella 50 at 50, Preziosa 100 at 100. In the middle, Dailycream is dosed at 150, Dariloy and Base Senza Lattosio at 250, Base Anita at 300. At the top, the Soft 400 line — Yogo, Cioko and Sole — and Base Cheesecake 500 run at 350 to 400 grams per litre, and Gran Yoga 500 at a full 500.

The pattern worth internalising is that dosage and control move in opposite directions. A gelateria that wants a house style buys low and does the arithmetic. A gelateria that wants twelve consistent tubs from a rotating casual staff buys high and spends its attention elsewhere. Both are defensible. What is not defensible is buying a complete base and then treating the result as a signature product.

Reading the dosage figure correctly

The single most expensive misreading in this category is treating every dosage number as the same kind of number. It is not.

Cream bases are quoted per litre of finished mix. Fruit bases and the complete fruit bases are quoted per litre of water — the Conca d'Oro line at 500 grams per litre of water, for instance, is a complete sorbet preparation where water is the only other ingredient. Semifreddo bases are quoted separately against milk and against cream, because the fat content of the liquid changes how much structure the base has to provide: Top Mousse at 150 against cream, Top Semifreddo at 200 to 300.

Cost the wrong way and a base looks twenty per cent cheaper or dearer per litre of finished product than it is. Working the true cost per litre of gelato, rather than per kilogram of pail, is the only comparison that means anything — and it is usually where an apparently expensive base wins.

Hot process, cold process, and why it matters here

A hot process base is added before pasteurisation and holds at temperature with the mix, typically 65 to 85 degrees depending on the schedule. That heat is doing real work: stabiliser gums hydrate properly, proteins denature and open up, and the mix ages into something with more body than the sum of its ingredients. Base Vegan Lovers, for instance, is a 65-degree product — the temperature is part of the specification, not a convenience.

A cold process base dissolves in cold liquid and goes straight to the batch freezer. It needs no pasteuriser, which for a small site is often the difference between making gelato and not making it. The cost is hydration: gums that never fully swell give less body per gram and a texture that degrades faster over a service day.

There is a longer treatment of the trade-off, including the ageing step and what it is worth, in Hot Base vs Cold Base.

Neutrals and enhancers

A neutral is a stabiliser and emulsifier blend with no sugar or solids of its own, dosed at 3 to 6 grams per kilogram. It is the tool of choice when you have a recipe you like and a texture problem you want to solve without disturbing anything else. Because the dose is so small, a neutral is also the easiest product in the category to get badly wrong: a two-gram error at this scale is a forty per cent overdose, and the result is a mix that pulls like chewing gum.

Enhancers sit alongside. These are products that raise the solids, improve the spatula behaviour, or slow melting in a hot display, and they are the correct answer when a base is almost right. Reaching for a second complete base instead means running two balance sheets at once, which is how gelaterias end up unable to explain why a flavour changed.

Fruit bases are a separate decision

A fruit base has to build body without milk protein and usually without milk fat, against a mix that is mostly water, sugar and acid. That is a harder structural problem than a cream base, and it is why the fruit-base products behave differently: Nolat Base Frutta at 50 grams per litre deliberately produces a consistency closer to sorbet than to cream gelato, while Base Frutella 50 uses vegetable fibre to push the result back toward creaminess.

The complete fruit bases — the Conca d'Oro line — collapse the whole question into one product: pineapple, strawberry, lemon, peach, mango, lime, coconut, dissolved into water at 500 grams per litre. They are the fastest route to a consistent fruit tub, and they are filed here rather than under pastes for a reason: they are bases that happen to carry a flavour, not flavours that need a base.

Choosing for an Australian summer

Display cabinets in a Sydney or Brisbane summer work harder than their European equivalents, and the products in this category were formulated in Sicily. A base that performs in Palermo in April may not hold in Parramatta in January. The failure mode is rarely dramatic: it is a tub that looked correct at ten and is grainy at four, which is exactly the kind of fault that gets blamed on the batch freezer.

Where a choice exists, favour the higher stabiliser load, and trial any new base through a genuinely hot week rather than in autumn. Cabinet door frequency matters as much as ambient temperature — every opening admits humid air that condenses and refreezes on the surface of the product, and that is the mechanism behind most of what operators describe as "the gelato going icy". The full diagnosis is in Solving Ice Crystallisation, and the arithmetic behind the balance sheet is in How to Balance a Gelato Recipe.

What we cannot tell you yet

Ingredient declarations, allergen statements, shelf life and storage conditions are not published on these pages, because no Elenka specification sheet is held for the Australian range. Those fields are absent rather than blank: an empty allergen list would assert that a product is allergen-free, and that is a claim this business cannot support. Request the sheet for any product you are considering and we will get it from the manufacturer.

Published bases so far include Base Cheesecake 500, Cioko Soft 400, Sole Soft 400 and Base Vegan Lovers. The remaining lines are listed in the 2026 catalogue.