He is not letting nature take its course. He samples the stuff in stores, hawks it on the sidewalk: I first encountered him - in a burgundy beret - offering tastes in front of the Narberth American Family Market on an unseasonably warm day weeks ago, his pints of holiday egg nog, vanilla and Bada Bing (a fudgy chocolate, almond, bing cherry) wilting despite the tub of ice.
Gelati di Capri roughly means "ice cream from goats," or let us be clear, "goat's milk." We'll get into its particular qualities in a moment, though suffice to say it can have an icy, slightly crystalline texture if you try to eat it still hard-frozen. Let it soften for several minutes, though, and it has an appealingly light, clean finish, closer in mouthfeel to what they used to call ice milk (or some sorbets or frozen yogurt) than the creamy richness associated with handcrafted, cow's-milk Italian gelati.
It is spun in a three-gallon batch freezer, made indeed with sweet goat milk from an Amish farmer. (One sampler said he'd prefer more goatiness.) It doesn't skimp on artisanal add-ins - crumbs of Gilda's awesome local biscotti, intense Scharffen Berger Chocolate cocoa, mandarin-orange paste in the lemon-boosted Mandarin Cremesicle.
It has the appropriate regalia on the label, de rigueur these days for certain shelves: Bada ditched the orginal fructose. A sticker says: "Now with Agave," the latest sweetheart of natural foodies.
For a while, the label listed "coconut oil," a fat-enhancer (along with egg yolks), since goat's milk is too low in butterfat - between 4 and 6 percent, half that of most ice creams - to make non-icy ice cream. But Bada felt regular coconut oil had a woodsy scent, and that organic coconut oil smelled overpoweringly of, well, coconut.
He took it out, adjusting the gums instead.
