Sophia Brothers, Gelato Maker
NONNA’S GELATO
Kent by way of Highbury
From a small village near Perugia, Italy, to the UK’s capital, Sophia learned everything she knows about gelato from her nonna, Elsa (and, of course, from consuming copious cones over the years). Armed with nonna’s base recipe, or fior di latte, Sophia turned to seasonal, local produce – milk from Guernsey and Jersey cows, Kent cobnuts, tart gooseberries – for the ultimate fusion of Italian and British heritage. Think scoops of homegrown mint choc chip, blackberry and vanilla crumble gelato, and chocolate and Sicilian blood orange marmalade sorbet, which are infused, aged and churned in small batches and served from a vintage bike at east London’s Broadway market. After all, the best Italian recipes always start with nonna.
”My nonna, Elsa, was born in a tiny village in Italy near Perugia. I remember her fussing around us in the kitchen; she made everything from scratch and always wanted to feed us. We were always in the kitchen, rolling out pasta on the kitchen table, making pasta sauces, custard and, as we got older, limoncello. When we went to Italy, her siblings grew most of their produce so we would see Nonna’s brother picking tomatoes, pulping them and making jars and jars of passata – enough stock to last them a lifetime.
My base recipe is one that Nonna showed me how to make, a really simple milk gelato called fior di latte. I did adapt it a little… I don’t have a professional background in food, I did a degree in photography and worked at the Science Museum. However, my love of all things gelato and the many, many portions I’ve consumed over the years took me down that path. It all happened quite organically: I took a few courses, bought a few books and I was just making it at home. Some friends encouraged me to do more with it and, at the time, I was living near Broadway Market, where we mainly sell now, and there wasn’t an ice-cream stall there. I applied, had an interview and the next day I found out that I’d got the pitch. At this point I didn’t have any means of selling it, so I quickly had a lovely bike made, to trade from.
With gelato, you need good-quality, fresh ingredients. As milk forms 60% of the recipe, you need a really good milk, which luckily in this country we have, from Guernsey and Jersey cows. You can taste the difference immediately. Then it’s about making sure that every other ingredient that goes in is just as good – in-season fruit when it’s at its best, and good-quality chocolate or nuts.
This is how we came up with our core menu, drawing from traditional Italian flavours but using ingredients on our doorstep, and working with local suppliers, such as local roasteries. We do it all by hand. We’d love to be able to invest in a pasteuriser, which does all of the cooking for you, but, at the moment, we do it on the hob. To start, you heat up your milk and cream (if the recipe has cream in) until about 85C, then you add your sugars, chocolate and nuts halfway through, mixing it all together, and that’s called the pasteurisation process. If it’s a fruit-based recipe, we’ll cook or purée the fruit, depending on what fruit it is, and it always gets added when the batch has cooled, so you don’t cook the fruit on top and lose some of its flavour. We then put it in the fridge and age it for at least 24 hours, but you can leave it for five days – the longer you age it, the longer the flavours have to infuse together. You then have the churning stage. We pour our batch through our gelato machine and it churns the liquid form into cold gelato in about eight minutes. When it comes out of the machine, we tub it up if it’s going to a shop or restaurant, or ready for our bike to be scooped the next day. We normally churn the day before it’s going to be served, so it’s really fresh. When it comes out of the machine, it’s almost like a soft serve – it’s my favourite time to eat it. Obviously, it can’t be served like that because it’s not meant to be soft serve!
“We draw from traditional Italian flavours but use ingredients on
our doorstep”
Sophia Brothers
The cobnut gelato is probably my favourite; it tastes like a Ferrero Rocher. We source the cobnuts from this incredible farm in Kent – they are so rich in flavour. Our mint choc chip, which we make with garden mint, is very fresh. The ones with alcohol take the longest to get right – the anti-freeze qualities of alcohol means it takes a lot longer to balance everything to make sure the texture and flavour works. There are a few I’m still trying to make work. One of my favourite things to eat in Italy is big white peaches, ripe off the trees, with slices of goat’s cheese, and I thought this would be incredible as a gelato. I’m sure one day I’ll crack it.
In full-swing summer, we make about 70 litres of gelato for Broadway Market. We’d also be doing three to four events on top of that per week, and we might be catering for 1,000 people per event, so our portion numbers can be crazy high in the summer, and then in January we could be doing 40 litres a month that are just going to shops. We tried to make everything a little more manageable this year, now that I have a child. Just before Covid-19, we had decided that we would stop the wholesale side of things so that when winter comes around, I get a proper break. This has obviously taken a U-turn at the moment as the only thing I can really do is wholesale. There were a couple of months where we weren’t doing anything and it felt horrible. Now that we’re making and supplying again, it’s great. I was devastated to stop as we have some really great stockists – the decision to do that was to focus on the market and events, which, when they happen, take up so much time that it can be hard to juggle everything. What I’m missing most at the moment is being at the market, and being face-to-face with our customers, so I might focus on our wholesale and markets. We don’t have any really long-terms plans – I’m not very good at the planning and business side of it, I just go with the motions. I really like it as it is, it’s a nice work-life balance.
Nonna’s Gelato is very much a family business, it’s my two sisters and I. My aunt always asks, ‘When is it going to be sold in supermarkets?’, but I don’t think that will ever happen because the minute it can’t be made by us and has to be made on a much bigger scale, it isn’t the same product. I want to keep it small and be the person who is making it and selling it, so you see all sides of the business.”
For more, visit nonnasgelato.com
Photography: Nonna’s Gelato
@nonnasgelato
