Hope you guys like the video! :) I totally forgot to mention that gelato also has less fat than ice cream. I had that in my notes but forgot to include it for some reason. So what do YOU prefer? American ice cream or gelato?
I think I can speak on from a rather unique perspective. My grandfather was an ice cream manufacturer in Meridian, Mississippi, in the 1920s-1960s, so when my family would go to visit I established a solid understanding for what good, non-mass-produced, American ice cream tasted like, All in the interests of science, of course.. Then, immediately after I raided his inventory for the last time at age 10, my family moved to Germany for three years, the first two at Erding and Freising, right near Feli's hometown. So at a fairly early age, I had a good basis for comparison. In the 1960s, I would say that German Eis had less variety of flavors than American (more to come on that in a moment), it was served softer, and the texture was a little lighter. I know now, but didn't then, that that was a function of a lower fat content. A cousin found a paper with my grandfather's base recipe, and the math works out to about 12% or so, which is at the low end the the modern range of Haagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry's. But German Eis was WAY more like American ice cream of the time than either one was like gelato. So I suspect that what's happened over the last 50-60 years is that German Eis has evolved toward gelato, while American ice cream has stayed more or less as it was. Which is better? Someone else got it right, I think: you usually prefer what you're used to. I like gelato fine--I like French glace better because I find it creamier. But good American ice cream has an emotional resonance for people who grew up on it. As to the modern variety of weird flavors: I personally prefer the classics, but even then on the small scale of his production my grandfather would have had 15 or so on offer at the soda fountain counter at any given time.
I used to work in Ice Cream in the UK. Whilst there they were trying to develop a "Euro Ice", something that could be sold all over the EU legally as "Ice Cream". not possible. Each state had their own legal definition. On the subject of soft/hard. Yes fat content but also type of fat, has a bearing but the ratio of mix to air is important ("Overrun") "Soft Scoop" has a lower melting point due to formulation, often containing glycerine.
For me it's more situation based. If I'm on vacation, if it's really hot or I'm just walking around town in the summer then I prefer Eis (usually a scoop of raspberry and a scoop of chocolate). If I'm home or sitting down in a restaurant then a bigger portion, all chocolate, with more textures and more fat sounds great (I LOVE Ben&Jerry's half baked).
I can honestly say I love European Eis, but I do love a creamy scoop of ice cream. It is a personal opinion but I find that in America we have so many brands of ice cream that are so much better then Ben and Jerry’s. I have found that I have my absolute favorite brand when we visit Texas and another in the area where we live. I can also remember the delight as a teenager visiting family in Germany and experiencing Spaghetti Eis in Germany. It was iconic and just a special experience. Also, I find that in the state’s it is becoming more common to find Gelato at the grocery store. Still not the same as eating it at the parlor where it is freshly made. I apologize for drawling on about the topic. Have a great day. 😊
Most USA Store bought ice creams aren't real ice cream, read the ingredients as they have lots of fillers that help it not melt as fast, for shipping. Get a bowl of real ice cream and the fake cheap stuff and let it sit for an hour. You will see the REAL ice cram with CREAM melts faster. You can get REAL ice creams from store but you will pay more. Always READ THE INGREDIENTS.
As for serving temperature: Ideally, American Ice Cream is served the way you get it at an Ice Cream Shop; which is soft enough to eat immediately, but cold enough that you have at least a little time to do it. The rock hard stuff is what you get at a private home - where the freezer temperature is set without regard to the ideal serving temperature of the Ice Cream. Also, the stuff at the grocery is chilled hard so you can finish shopping and get it home before it melts. That said, it is still American IC and is different from German IC because it has a different composition.
* Ice cream - Milk + cream + sugar. More cream, less milk. More fat. Heavily churned. * Gelato - Milk + cream + sugar. More milk, less cream. Less fat, more sugar. Lightly churned. * Sorbet - Water + flavoring. NO dairy. * Frozen yogurt - Lower in fat + yogurt cultures. * Sherbet - Sorbet, but with milk. * Custard - Ice cream + egg yolks. * Soft serve - Basically gelato with more air incorporated into it.
Yep. Correcting the video, ice cream doesn’t have egg yolks (that’s custard) and has more cream and less milk (by volume) than gelato. That gives ice cream more butterfat, which, while giving it a smoother mouthfeel, makes it harder to taste the flavor (because the fat coats your tastebuds, desensitizing them to the ice cream flavor). I personally like that ice cream is colder, but gelato always seems to have a fuller, more intense flavor - a big plus for a frozen food.
There is that perception among Europeans that "everything in America has peanut butter in it." It's just like to Americans, everything in Europe has hazelnuts in it.
German Gelato factory worker here: our Gelato has at least 60% whole milk and is like cement too, if you get it out of the freezer at -18°C. Other than most other ice creams and gelatos here in Germany which contain much more air than our Gelato. This instant creaminess usually comes from much air or smoothening substances
Agreed. As an Italian, gelato you get in groceries stores will be usually hard out of the freezer compared to fresh gelato. And if I eat some when I get home after buying it, it's softer than when I take it out of my freezer, because it probably warmed up a bit while travelling. So, the hardness isn't very indicative in my opinion because it's heavily dependant on temperature.
Intersting, I worked as a seller in a big food store in germany(also made my education there) and there I learned that regulare frozen food needs -18°c, but Ice/Ice Cream even -21°c. So I´m a bit confused about 18°c from someone who worked in the production of Ice Cream.
@@rebeccaquartieri5509 It's a staple in Germany! Vanilla isn't my favorite flavor (lemon is), but I always order Spaghettieis when the icecream truck shows up. :)
I’m 60 years old, and I hadn’t even heard of gelato until about15 years ago. I’ve still never had it because It’s never been in the stores where I shop.
@〰Mila〰 Blue moon icecream is called Schlumpfeis (Smurf ice cream) in Germany and very common for kids. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_moon_(ice_cream) So I was joking about the name.
@@hydrolito No, it has a very unnatural blue colour. The colour is food colour. Children seems to like this blue. The taste is very often vanilla or it is "bubble gum".
I'm German, and I love love love American ice cream! I wasn't really aware that ice cream and gelato were different things? And while I do love both, Ben & Jerry's is just something else. I'm obsessed with it!
We do have something very similar if not identical to straciatella in the US. It's called chocolate chip, and depending on the brand name, you're going to get either traditional chips are ribbon flakes. We even have mint chocolate chip! I think you have to go back to see how ice cream was originally made in the US, with real cream and rock salt. You can even make your own ice cream at home using more traditional methods. The best thing about ice cream, is the ability to make a root beer float, very refreshing on a hot summer day/
This creamy gelato in Germany is a super new invention, less than 20 years old. Back in the 80's I really got into trouble by trying to get the ice cream out of the box with one of my Grandma's silver spoons. Today the German "gelato" might be soft and smooth, but in the 70's or 80's or 90's it was hard as concrete like the american icecream is still today.
I think you and several other respondents are right about this. I lived in Europe from 1966-1970, and I don't recall any difference in the type of ice cream I had there compared to what I found in the US.
Ah, that explains why I am never astonished when I buy american ice cream and it is very hard coming out of the freezer. I am more astonished when I have "gelato" that isn't rock hard - but I am a german kid of the eighties
@@gepee3654 Germany is a very different place now than it was when I lived there in the late 1960's. Back then Germans only bathed once a week, if that. And they were fatter than Americans.
In most decent sized American cities you can find American style ice cream, gelato, frozen yogurt, and frozen custard. They each have a place in my heart and in my stomach!
That applies to everywhere, the strange thing felicia was talking about was, you have 4 different names for it. You cannot just take something cold in your mouth and eat it - first you have to research for the ingredients to know what you eat. It's icy, that's why it's ice ;-)
And: DQ Soft Serve, Wendy's Frosty, ICEE, 7-11 Slurpee and of course Sonic's desert menu! All the best food exists in America and we have the waste lines for proof!
I was born in and grew up in the US but I still like to mash up my ice cream a bit before eating it. I find American ice cream too stiff and often I thaw it just a bit before even reaching for the scoop.
A reason I think we like the cement ice cream here in the south east is because it is so dang hot. We slowly, with a warm spoon after held under a warm stream of water at the kitchen sink, dig out the ice cream we desire into a bowl, then take our time putting the ice cream back in the freezer and getting a cold Coca-Cola out of the refrigerator to wash down the milky aftertaste and by the time we get to the couch in the living room, the ice cream has started to soften up enough to eat the softer edges first. 😋 mmmmmm I love Butter Pecan. And Black Walnut. And your videos.
i've never done the coca-cola thing (personally, for darker sodas, i prefer cream soda or butterbeer) but yeah, that's definitely one of the main reasons americans like "cement" ice cream
The hard deep-freeze ice cream in the US is a recent thing, like since the 1950's. Its made with real full-on cream and is cooked a bit before churning it, designed for shipping and handling. When you make ice cream at home and hand churn it, most recipes use "half-and-half", or half cream half milk, and don't freeze it so hard. A poor-man's or budget ice cream for making at home is really "ice milk" - not far different than German gelato but less creamy and more crystalline. If you like German gelato, buy at American grocery stores "sherbet" - it is made with some dairy cream but has the same texture and smoothness as gelato and simpleness of flavors. A lot of Americans mix up "sherbet" with "sorbet", but a French style sorbet is almost like a frozen fruit smoothie and nothing like a sherbet. In an answer to hard-freeze ice cream being hard to handle at fast food places, Americans can up with "soft serve ice cream" -- think Dairy Queen cones or Wendy's Frostys. If you were to put these on a scale most creamy to most crystalline, you can rank the various products as thus: American Hard-freeze Ice Cream American Homemade Ice Cream American Sherbet / German Gelato American Soft Serve Ice Cream American Ice Milk French-style Sorbet Italian Ice Some might argue that Sherbet and Soft Serve should be swapped in this list of creaminess scale.
I have no idea where you got your info but its Wrong. It dates back to at least the 1870's, and is derived from the Philadelphia style IC. Some say it came with Scots in the 18 century. Check your facts.
@@b5wlol7rreesepeacemaybenot20 The makers of the home made ice cream you experienced are not churning their ice cream long enough -- my brother and I used to have to crank the ice cream maker in summer for anywhere from 2 hours to 4 hours adding ice and salt throughout the process (the salt is very important!) -- and then you need to freeze the container for and hour or so after you take the paddles out. At family gatherings, we would start the ice cream right after lunch so that it could go in freezer by dinner for consumption after dinner was done and the dishes done.
@@madmike5421 My information is quite correct. I lived in Ft. Wayne, IN, and worked at the Allen Dairy Farms Creamery -- now a part of Prairie Farm Dairies (now Progressive Dairies) -- home to several brands of ice cream including Allen Dairy Ice Cream, North Star Ice Cream and others. Later I worked at Edy's Creamery in town -- now Nestle Dreyer Creamery -- where several brands of ice cream were produced including Edy's Ice Cream, Dreyer's Ice and Meadow Gold Ice Cream. Fort Wayne was also home to Atz, makers of Atz Ice Cream and Puritan Ice Cream. In fact northern and central Indiana is the largest producer of ice cream second only to California. As an employee and history buff we learned a lot about how ice was made historically and how it changed. Most of the facilities had their start in the 1920's, and post-WW2 economics changed the way ice cream was produced and distributed. Edy's Slow Churned Ice Cream, introduced in the 1990's, harkens back to the older less dense softer ice cream of pre-WW2, though the emulsifiers used still produce a different product than in times back. If you have any more questions, I would start with this article: www.progressivedairy.com/blogs/guest-blog/from-the-diary-of-a-dairywoman-the-history-of-allen-dairy and look on Edys website.
@@scotthall2723 I remember when I was a kid back in the 1940's, My Uncle's idea of a wild Saturday night was home made ice cream and a bonfire with hot dogs and marshmallows. I'm sorry that those days are long gone.
Interesting. In Australia ice cream and gelato are generally seen as 2 different things. You can have one shop selling ice-cream right next door to a gelato shop.
It's all "what you grew up with". Our ice cream is more like what we would make at home, for the family. We make it in a hand-cranked ice cream maker. I remember at family reunions, the men and boys were in charge of making the ice cream - taking our turns turning the crank until the ice cream was done. When it snows, we gather the fresh-fallen snow, add egg yolks, sugar and milk, to make "snow ice cream". We did this every winter, growing up! P.S. I am an American who hates peanut butter! I like the salted peanuts, just fine, however. I prefer American ice cream over gelato, any day, personally.
I'm an Australian who hates peanut butter. Can't stand the stuff. People look at me like I'm the devil incarnate if I say so. I like the thicker icecream and I love gelato. I'll take any of it. One of my favourite toppings on icecream is Nutella. You're welcome.
I like peanut butter but not in ice cream. I like ice cream flavors that have a lot of chunks in them like a chocolate ice cream that has fudge threw it along with some brownie pieces.
My favourite too when in Germany, although quite a simple concept. Unfortunately rarely seen here in UK, at least not with the very fine chocolate bits. So I tend to make do with mint choc chip instead.
@@FelifromGermany Oh yes I forgot about those. It's been a long time for me. But the ones I had back in the day were meh at best when compared to European ones. Love ur vids btw, they are always so informative. Even to an Austrian who's lived in the states for many years.
one thing I would like to point out, if you go to an ice cream place there are two different types of ice cream you typically get, scooped hard ice cream(which is what you showed, which is what we get from the store) or soft serve ice cream, which you can only really get from certain ice cream shops. Its a different temperature and texture.
Apples and Oranges. I like both. One thing though in US brands of ice cream; there is a lot a variation in product. Häagen-Dazs (sounds Danish, right? American actually) is extremely high in fat (cream), very rich. Ben and Jerry's is flavorful, but less rich. Blue Bell (Texas) has a really fantastic texture (especially their Dutch Chocolate). And then there are traditional stores like Basken Robbins with all those choices, half the fun putting multiple flavors together. Cheap brands tend to be a lot less fat content and thus less fullness in the mouth. I like Gelato too, especially the tangy fruits which really erupt in your mouth. But they have a less fullness feel in the mouth than American Ice Cream (I grew up in Canada and ours was like American). I would say one difference is North Americans just grow up more milk oriented (drinking milk) than Europeans, that would be my best guess. Or it's like anything, you like what you grow up with. How can you explain why Americans like Root Beer? My wife (non-American) think it tastes like soap. As to temperature. Traditionally ice cream is consumed mostly in Summer. On a hot day its a race, especiually for kids, to finish the ice cream before it melts. It's generally a lot hotter in the US than Europe so those extra degrees (with a larger US scoop) just might make it possible to get home without a screaming kids at the end.
I think that the difference are largely based in the (by our standards) poorer quality dairy products (cream and milk) at the base of the recipes. I remember trying Ben & Jerries and Haagen Daz after being told they were typical very high-end american ice creams and found them exactly the same as our 'normal' supermarket ice creams (worse in some cases), which are maybe 1/4- 1/3 of the price of the two american brands. People here buy them because of the brand, not the quality but they aren't huge sellers.
In the UK I think we just call it all ice cream, but you know that there's different quality ones. Traditional ice cream places here (like at the seaside) will normally have mostly simple flavours plus a few weird ones. In supermarkets you get everything from Ben and Jerry's to basic own brand vanilla, chocolate or strawberry to traditional Cornish clotted cream ice cream.
Very interesting! My understanding is that American ice cream is frozen so as to prevent ice crystals from forming in it, which tends to ruin the texture. On the other hand, this makes it unsuitable for applications like ice-cream cones, milkshakes, etc., so the more-gelato-like 'soft-serve' ice-cream machine was invented. Another possible factor: American desserts often feature a hot, bakery item (pie, cake, brownies, etc) topped with a scoop of ice cream. A harder ice-cream resists melting longer, allowing the diner to enjoy the taste, texture AND temperature contrast of, say, a hot slice of apple pie, topped with a frozen scoop of vanilla ice cream. Soft-serve or gelato would turn to a puddle almost instantly in this application.
ok, none of your understanding of ice cream is right^^ the crystals form when it is too deep frozen and not moved. and all you say is just like an american pie...
Soft serve ice cream is continuously churned by the machine to keep any large ice crystals from forming. That does trap the air too, but the air is not injected or anything like that.
@@jamesfrankiewicz5768 Carvel ice cream used to make soft serve ice cream. Commonly, it was believed that this was a lighter weight ice cream, as it had "air injected" into it to make it "fluffy." Soft serve ice cream from Carvel was also cheaper than hard ice cream which they also offered. Burger King also had "soft serve" ice cream for a few years (I think they discontinued it), and can tell you for certain, it injected air into the ice cream. I had to repair the machine on nearly a daily basis (which is probably why it was discontinued).
@@Leon-wz1js what you refer to soft serve ice cream seems to me "Soft-Eis" as we call it in Germany. This type of ice cream is not scooped but comes out of a machine with air pressure through a tubing and filled into a cone. There is air in it, or better said nitrogen, which also serves to freeze the liquid in the machine on the way out.
A LOT of these relatively minor differences in prepared foods occurred in the middle of the 20th century in America, and were reflective of the need to get products to suburban and rural supermarkets hundreds (or even thousands) of miles away from where they were produced. (and thus reflected the dramatic difference in American and European population densities.) Perhaps the "American variant" simply traveled better, or was easier to produce in factories circa 1945. From there, this style of Ice cream simply became popular as people grew up with it. I'm in my late 30's and I can't tell much difference in the quality of ice cream available in higher end supermarket brands and that available at dedicated Ice Cream Parlors (Like Baskin Robbins) but I have heard my baby boomer parents say that this was NOT always the case: They said supermarket Ice cream from the 1960's and 1970's was "mass produced dreck." Also: I think we DO have a version of what you call straciatella: seems a lot like what we call "chocolate chip." It's not very popular anymore but it is still available. (We used to have more simple Ice Cream flavors here too-- all these crazy exotic flavor combinations really became popular in about the 1990s.) Thanks and I really enjoy your videos!
At a guess, I’d say we Americans prefer our “cement” ice cream to the softer gelato varieties for the same reason we have air conditioning in our homes, because it gets much hotter in the summer here. Soft ice cream is going to turn into flavored milk in a hurry on a hot summer day.
It's true that Americans love peanut butter and we put it in everything. I just eat it off a spoon sometimes (one big scoop...no double dipping). If the rest of the world doesn't want to get onboard with that then fine...more delicious salty peanut butter for us.
The Dutch put peanut sauce on top of their fries! You might want to try it. Also as an experiment, try to put nutella and peanut butter in everything for a month, and let your doctor watch over the experiment. Report if you approached death twice as fast in that time.
In Israel we call the soft serve ice cream "American ice cream" 😂 I actually never thought there was a difference between gelato and ice cream, I just thought gelato was the italian name for ice cream and that Ben&Jerry's specifically are just dense and frozen but never felt it was a different texture or anything... For me they are all basically the same 🤷🤤😋
" I just thought gelato was the italian name for ice cream" - it is ... but the way gelato is made vs icecream, they are different. I've actually found that icecreams are all slightly different in many countries.
I am Australian, but lived in Münster for years. I was amazed by the ice cream culture. There were tiny ice cream shops all over the place and people would eat it while walking around, even during the winter. It wasn’t long before I was doing it too!😀
I lived in Germany as a child and 30 yrs later I still remember the taste of Mr. Getty's banana ice cream (gelato) and the small sugar cones. Sooo good!
must be some kind of american story. never heard of a mr getty. i am in germany since the beginning of the 80s. could you pls tell me, who this mr getty is?
Rick Argotsinger I kept hearing this while I was growing up, but when I finally tried it, I learned that store-bought ice cream is much better.I guess it's the romance of home-made that gets you.
When I would visit the German (then girlfriend, now wife) I always liked the smaller scoops, because you could get them for 1 euro each (I'm sure it's more now, I didn't pay attention). Though while at Sylt, a damn seagull mugged me (flew from behind me, over my shoulder, and knocked my ice cream from off my cone, and he and his seagull friends ate it up off the ground). The wife and her sister to this day laugh their ass off about that... Always liked getting the Langnese containers at the grocery store in Germany, it wasn't a frozen block, but little mounds with toppings rather than "I guess there are chocolate and cherries mixed in there". One difference I noticed with the wife, and we often have (teasing) arguments is about what we Americans in general call bread. Germans love their bread, and have many different types, while Americans usually are talking about sandwich bread. But Germans don't make their sandwiches out of that. They do have something that looks like sliced bread, but it's only used for toast, hence, it is called toast. But (my argument) it's not toasted yet, so it can't be toast! So she'll say something along the lines of give her a slice of toast, and I'm about to put it in the toaster, and she's like what are you doing? (Me) You said you wanted toast, I'm toasting it. (German wife) No, I don't want it toasted, I just want the slice. (Me) Oh, so you wanted bread, why didn't you say that? (GW) We have bread, where is it? (Me) Here. (GW) No, that's toast! (Me) It can't be, it's not toasted yet! In the end, I have coined it untoasted toast...
My mom way back in the day made homemade bread. It was Swedish rye bread which doesn't taste like rye bread at all. It was my dad's mom's recipe. She made it every christmas season. The recipe made enough for our household and gifts for our neighbors.
About the Toast thing: I'm German and I had this argument with my younger brother more than once. He is teasing me by calling it "ungetoastest Toast" (untoasted toast). I would refer to it as Weißbrot (white bread) but it's true that the common word for it is Toastbrot, even when it's not toasted.
@@Henning_Rech True, the price was only 1/10 of todays price, but peoples income is on average 10 times higher now and the scoopes significantly increased in size. So on average you get more ice cream now per hour of work than a few decades ago. In other words: The purchasing power of peoples income measured in liters of ice cream increased over time.
Yes... true story when I was little someone broke into our house and stole a lot of things. They took our microwave and me and my sisters were so upset because in that microwave was... you guessed it. Our jar of peanut butter 😂🤣😂 we literally cried because our peanut butter was stolen lol
Cincinnati has Graeters which is made differently from other traditional ice creams in the US. It uses the French pot method which incorporates less air. Growing up we didn’t have gelato available in the grocery store so I prefer it because it’s what I grew up with. (Though as a Cincinnati native I really love Graeters)
If you’re in Cincinnati, you should check out Graeter’s (if you haven’t already). Yes, it’s American style, but they’re based in Cincy, and their salted caramel is to die for. Also, for me as a midwestern American who vastly prefers a texture similar to gelato, frozen custard, like at Culver’s, is the way to go!
The "Spaghettieis" is a German invention! A young ice cream creator came up with this idea, but it flopped at its first tries. Most customers thought that actual spaghettis were used and this imagination is of course is kinda disgusting... But it became more and more popular after a few years. Luckily, the inventor forgot to protect the idea by patent so every ice cream parlor could serve it and make different variations.
Yes but he was or is (he is still alive) an Italian immigrant. But because he used a spaetzle ricer, Germany technology is somehow involved. Thanks Swabia.
You can get now also other "fake italian dish" eis in these ice cream parlor, like Pizza-Eis and Lasagne-Eis which are things made to look like pizza and lasagne using ice cream, fruits and fruit sauces.
This USA guy says, "Gelato is sooooo delicious." When I was in Italy, my friend made fun of me because I ate so much gelato (I deserved the teasing. Haha).
You are right. They are, aside from both being frozen, completely different. Gelato is more fruit based, meanwhile (North American) ice cream (and frozen custard) is almost entirely dairy based.
In the UK we actually mostly eat the "American" type ice cream. Gelato only became available in the last 10 years... To be honest I prefer the American style, because you get a better melt in your mouth feeling. Gelato is already soft, and stays pretty thick even when melted. Ice cream goes from solid to thin liquid.
Can confirm. In the UK ice cream is what you might call American ice cream. Gelato is always called gelato. I wonder if American ice cream is really British ice cream.
I have at least 2 pints of ice cream per week. Love it. Always take your pint of B&J or HD or Graeters (Graeters is made in OH and is by far the best ice cream you can get) out of the freezer and put it in the microwave for 30 seconds. then it's perfect. I'm going to the market now and try some gelato now.
Well as a German I just see Ice-cream and Gelato as sub categories of *Speiseeis* . One is soft (weich -> luftig) the other hard (fest -> dicht). Also *Softeis* (that's how I know it) comes to my mind which I'd say is another sub cat. of Speiseeis. It's kind of an instant Ice-cream from a machine, very creamy and as I know it more artificial (less/no chance of finding real fruits or natural ingredients in it) than *Speiseeis* . Some people blaim the food industry to include more air into the ice-cream to increasing the volume while keeping its weight (900ml weighing only 500g). Might be true, but I don't mind cause I like it being soft 😁 Damn - now I want ice-cream 😳 All the best Feli 🤗
Gruss Gott Feli. Not sure you'll see this since it's two years after you made this video, but American ice cream was quite the hot-item in Germany at any German-American Fest that sold it. The lines at the American ice cream stands were unbelievable. I lived in Germany from 1992 to 1994 and this was universally true no matter what G-A Fest I went to, whether it was in Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, Augsburg, and others. Of course, taste in personal, and a big difference can also be texture. What you loved growing up can be a hard thing to let go of. There are many things I would rather eat in Germany than the U.S., e.g. bread, salad (a house salad before a meal in a restaurant, zwiebelkuchen (oh how I miss this), and a several other things--the point is, I loved the food in Germany. But ice cream? Hands down American ice cream is better (for me, of course). Naturally, it has to be good quality ice cream. Crap ice cream/eis/gelato in any country is going to taste like crap. Americans as you've already figured out like sugar, so more sugar is better. American ice cream is also denser and more fulfilling. And like many of your followers have already suggested, homemade ice cream is amazing. You might like that a lot more because when you eat it after it's freshly made, it's much softer--so you'd probably like the texture more. Keep up the good work with your videos. They're lots of fun for an old retired veteran who thought of Germany as his Lieblingsland. Tschuss.
I was stationed in Germany in the 80's and have never tasted anything like what I ate a few times in downtown Heilbronn--spaghettieis is SO good! The consistency of the ice cream is sort of gravelly, and just delicious. There isn't anything like it in the US. That it's basically a strawberry sundae in the shape of a plate of spaghetti is just a bonus!
The thing I missed the most, when being in the US for a longer time: A nice loaf of bread, something dark, with a lot of seeds, instead of the white sugar bombs they call bread ;-D
@@NiklasMiroll It all depends on where you go. There are small mom and pop artisan bakeries that produce some great loaves of bread. Most ethnic groups in the United States tend to have their own bakeries in their neighborhoods.
The ice cream we buy in stores is usually hard ice cream which originated in Phila. NYC is the place of origin for soft serve or frozen custard. We also have water ice and gelato here at roadside stands
Eisdiele sounds like an ice dealer (which makes sense) but makes me think of some shady character making side deals of sweetened cream products down dark alleys. Oh, there’s stracciatella in the states, just not as popularly unfortunately.
@@not-a-theist8251 i think its called so bc of the plank at the widow, where ice cream is usally sol in europe, if u want to get a scoop u dont need to got into the store, ther is in most times a window where u can order ur takeaways
American ice cream changed about 15-20 years ago. Old single farm ice cream was rich and thick. New bulk brands started using more milk to get a consistent texture, and churning faster to add volume to their ice cream. The closer you get to old dairy farms in America, the more cream you would find in your ice cream. By using milk and whipping their ice cream, big brands like Ben and Jerry's could sell the same volume for less. After a couple years, it was just too much for single dairy farms to keep up with full cream ice cream. Like someone said before, many parts of America get hot enough that ice cream needs to be a little bit colder in order to give you enough time to eat it.
'Nother great topic - thanks! Near where I live in Massachusetts, we DO have a place nearby that sells home-made gelato that is wonderful and Stracciacella is indeed one of the flavors sold. I fell in love with it when we visited Italy a couple of years ago. However, I do love good quality American ice cream as well, and we have some wonderful places that serve it close to where I live, where there's always a line. Just like good quality bread (I make a mean homemade 100% rye sourdough Bauernbrot :) -- I think there's a huge difference in the quality of ice cream as well if it's homemade.
Very true homemade is made with sugar and real vanilla not high fructose corn syrup and imitation vanilla. And I'm pretty sure we had quite a bit of milk in the custard before we would add the cream. If you cranked the freezer you got to lick the paddle.
@@hansmeyer7225 But Italy is further north than many Southern & Southwestern US states. Texas and Florida, for example, are really more parallel to North Africa.
I’ve never heard of jellato, and I really don’t know what you’re talking about, but there’s a lot of diversity in ice cream in the states. Soft serve vs hand dipped, for instance. And most ice cream is kept at whatever temperature all the other things in that particular freezer are kept at, which might be very cold or quite warm. But I understand that you’re speaking of your limited personal experience, so I get that.
Home made ice cream in t the US is slow churned ( by hand) and is smooth, denser and softer consistency than grocery store ice cream. My suspicion is that American ice cream has more cream and eggs due to the easy availability of those ingredients in dairy farms in the early American life but I defer to anyone who has more information. I believe the high speed of churning and increased inclusion of air is based on industrial economics of profitability. My mother, who grew up on a farm in the early 1900s called our ice cream "frozen custard".
Actual frozen custard used to be more widely available but still is in urban areas. Or at Shake Shack, which started in New York City. It starts with a cooked egg and milk custard. If you buy French Vanilla ice cream, which should have egg yolks, you are half way there.
I like both gelato and ice cream, though in my opinion it’s the extra milk that makes ice cream more creamy than gelato. Also, here in the U.S. we also have a whole separate type of ice cream called “soft serve” that is completely different from the traditional ice cream. And it typically comes in traditional flavors like chocolate, vanilla, or swirl which is both chocolate and vanilla together and it’s squeezed out of a machine right onto a cone or into a cup. We tend to put sprinkles on the top. This is super popular in food trucks or stands and are a summer staple. ❤
Actually I remember that we also had to let the ice cream sit for a few minutes before being able to scoop it into a bowl when I was a child (in Germany). Nowadays we dont have to do that anymore.
Yes, same in Sweden. I remember I actually thought the freezer was broken the first time I got a carton of icecream at home that wasn't a block of cement. Now they are all soft, except for the american brands.
They put a lot more ingredients in the ice cream these days to make it softer. If you know too many details about the ingredients, you don't want to eat it anymore.
Haagendaas and Graeters are made and stored at lower temperatures. Breiers is much softer like your ice cream. The texture and hardness is dependent upon how much milk fat it contains. At one time ice milk was popular here which was made with skimmed milk. That one tasted like you were eating ice. You can also get soft serve ice cream from Dairy Queen. You have to go outside Cincinnati to readily get it. Kroger’s? My favorite is extreme maximum fudge moose tracks ice cream. You can also go to cold stone creamery and get practically anything made to order for what it contains. Later.
Gelato tastes like melted ice cream to me. When I was an exchange student in Sweden in the mid 1980's we had ice cream novelties bars, indiviual cones, etc. rather than a bowl of ice cream so no comparison there. But I prefer five ingredient ice cream like our favorite Aldi's (German origin retailer) Super Premium ice cream which contains cream, milk, sugar, pasteurized egg yolks, and chocolate or vanilla bean. Please no extra "enhancers" in my ice cream like you will find in other brands like Breyers, Edy's that make the ice cream creamier and softer. I prefer an ice cream that I can chew. Wow, I am so American, I can hear you laughing Felicia! LOL!! 🤣
William W., I am with you on the 5 ingredients! I'm that person in the grocery store standing in front of the freezer case reading the ingredients on the ice cream containers. I look for the ingredients you listed: cream, (possibly) milk, sugar, (possibly) egg yolk, and the flavor. There really should not be any other ingredient put in! This "5 ingredient" ice cream is more expensive, but it's better quality.
Many U.S. product availability is based on profit. They give us what makes them the most money. I'll bet this is one major reason for our version of ice cream. Also going back a few decades we also had mainly the basic flavors of ice cream. Then there was some experimentation to produce what we could custom order at a shop but available in stores. That led to an explosion of flavors as producers tried to increase sales. Fortunately much of the result is tasty! Never had much chance to try gelato but sure will go find some soon thanks to you! Thanks!!
- In the USA, gelato and sherbert are very similar. - American ice cream does not need to be kept at 12 degrees F. Holy cow, everything is hard as a brick at that temperature. The freezer in my kitchen is set around 20-22F, plenty cold for everything that needs to be kept frozen. As a result, ice cream is easier to scoop. - Ben & Jerry's came up with all those complicated flavors. When I was growing up back in the Stone Age we had vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and rocky road. Then someone introduced chocolate chips. Then Baskin Robbins introduced 31 flavors, none of which were anything like Ben & Jerry's goofy combinations. They were just additional fruit flavors flavors, plus mint. And a few swirls.
Not sure how old you are, but I was a kid in the 80s and while complicated/exotic flavors took off with Ben & Jerrys I do remember a good amount of variety at least in ice cream shops. Between Baskin Robbins and Thrifty (which may be a regional thing) there were the flavors you mentioned and others like cookies and cream, jamoca almond fudge, butter pecan, and rainbow sherbert. I do think it's an American thing to push the envelope on flavor combinations, whether it be ice cream, pizza, burgers, or whatever.
I'm only 49, but I'm pretty sure chocolate chip came before rocky road. Hell, I remember in the '80's when Weird Al came out with the song, I had zero clue WTF "Rocky Road" even was... . And even in the '70's we had Friendlies. I think the first non-grocers ice cream I ever had was their black raspberry... though NOTHING is as good as their peppermint stick. . Though to be fair, I never even HEARD of Baskin Robbins until the '90's... probably because there were none in New England. You wanted sit-down hard ice cream you went to Friendlies or HoJo's. Makes me sad, HoJo's is gone, and BOTH Friendlies locations here went under.
I lived in four very different countries by the time I was ten (Indonesia, Holland, Germany, and finally the US). What I discovered each time we emigrated to a new country was that I found the food there nearly unpalatable at first, especially German food. Food preferences are formed early in life, and it takes a long time to change them. I suspect this is the reason so many Americans prefer the type of "hard" ice cream commonly sold here, and why Europeans prefer the "gelato" style ice cream.
This is so true. Children actually begin becoming familiar with their native culture's food months before birth. So by the time we are born we already have a preference for the flavors mom ate, lol!
@@kurarisusa Interesting. After 50 years of living in Western countries, I've pretty much acclimated to most Western foods, but I still prefer Asian dishes. That's what I spent the first six years of my life eating, so my brain may have become "wired" for that kind of cuisine.
Guess it depends on what you started from/are used to. Gelato's kinda weird, maybe something exotic to try when tired of ice cream. This from someone who had to hand crank an ice cream machine with ice and rock salt during the summer to get any to eat, and now has multiple (6?) machines one inherited with compressor freezer but discontinued (missing knob), freeze bowls (most), motors, a couple ice and salt motored, old school, etc. Ideally find an old mechanical and hook up to a bicycle, earn the calories/+burn off
I was reading through a French travel book about America. And given the rather fussy nature of the French love of food you'd think they wouldn't have much to say about American foods. But two things they thought were exceptional, the many regional hamburgers and ... ice cream. They thought the USA was a paradise for ice cream. Not just Ben and Jerry's and Hagen Daz, but there was Baskin and Robbins 31 flavors, there are endless ice cream brands, and don't forget PUMPKIN ICE CREAM in October!!! Seriously there must easily be more than a hundred flavors of ice cream in America. (Butter Brickle anyone?) So if the French say it's pretty danged good.... And don't even think of substituting gelato (which I do love as well, but hey we have that too) for American ice cream to the women of America. It won't be pretty. Thanks Felicia!
In the end I think it all came down to what kind and how much milk was available at the time. Some places have cows that have much higher cream content in the milk as well as during some of the wars or just down economies made milk much more expensive and the only way to keep milk for long term use was to freeze it so when the general population couldn't afford to buy a lot of milk the farmers began selling it to Ic manufacturers so it would not be wasted and that is when the more creamy smooth Ic or American Ice cream began to change. Somewhere in the late 50s and early 60s would be my guess. Love your channel.
As a 54 year old American, I can tell you that I grew up eating home-made ice cream whenever I went to my grandmother’s house. It’s nothing like store-bought ice cream. I’ve had plenty of Gelato in my travels in Europe (including living in Belgium for almost eight years), and back here in the US I still prefer to have good Gelato rather than most American ice cream brands. But even though it’s Gelato, it’s still hard as a rock when I get it out of the freezer. Our freezers are just set to a lower temperature than you’re used to in Europe.
True. I think (maybe?) Americans tend to store and freeze more foods than in Europe. We might to go the market here twice a month to stock up and tend to buy in bigger quantities that need to be stored for longer. From what I understand about the European way of grocery shopping is more like buying whatever strikes your fancy for that day, where in America (especially in rural and suburban America), we might be stocking up for weeks when we go to the store. In Europe you might be using freezers for storing leftovers you cooked today or things you will be cooking tomorrow or the next day, but in the US we're using freezers for things we might be cooking in two weeks. I'm a single guy and even I have two freezers because of this and also because I store vac-sealed meat, salmon, seafood etc at lower temperatures for longer periods than ice cream and leftovers.
@@vikingshark2634 Americans hoard food like no other, which is why we have chest freezers, large fridges, and large pantries. We buy in bulk and visit the store less often. American food also has a longer shelf life.
As an american... I find gelato too light and fluffy as opposed to american ice cream, like I'm eating air. XD the spageteis just sounds fun and different.
Actually there is more air in American ice cream, gelato is just softer but also denser. But I find it also quite hard to find good tasting gelato in the US
@@thomastschetchkovic5726 then I may have never had real traditional gelato. Just talenti brand that comes in the clear container with the brown lid. Any recommendations?
Hmmm, interesting. I'm from the UK, and B&J and HD ice-creams always did feel "too hard", but I figured it was specific to the brands and not just because they were American. But most people consider them approximately equal to UK ice-cream, and there's no different name or anything. Flavourwise, we'd traditionally only have vanilla, strawberry and chocolate. Then there was a 3-flavour variant, with all three in stripes, and about the same time mint-choc-chip became popular. At some point we started getting things like cookies-and-cream in take-away ice cream parlours and then a plethora of other flavours, but these were pretty much always normal soft style, but maybe I just accepted American flavours as being harder because they were full of lumps of biscuit or whatever. Traditional Devonshire ice-cream is amazing - it's so creamy, it's unlike pretty much any flavour you can get anywhere else, and super tasty.
I was in West Germany in the 1980s and took a Rhine River tour. Before we got back to the base, Pirmasens, the bus broke down in a little village. I don't recall the name, but it was late and there was an ice cream shop open down the street. We waited for help to arrive by drinking beer and having a blast with real German people. Not the big city folks or the ones that were near military installations.
The American ice cream we know today came about at a Worlds Fair which took place in the late 1800's to early 1900's. They made the ice cream airy and hard so it wouldn't melt as fast in the summer heat. This is the story I've heard. Can't confirm it, but it makes sense.
Philadelphia Centennial Worlds Fair, 1876, and the introduction of the home ice cream hand crank churner. That Philly style non-cooked ice cream, the same kind Breyers® of Philadelphia also produced, which dominated the markets with the introduction of the frozen foods sections, is the very much basis of standard American style Ice Cream.
Haha this is funny timing. Just the other day I said to my husband, “i want ice cream but not the soft mushy stuff” (American living in Germany here). Normally I like German ice cream ok, but I was definitely craving the thick, creamy American ice cream on that day. If given the choice though, I’d choose the American kind almost every time. It’s a texture thing for me. I prefer it thicker and with chunks of cookies or cookie dough, etc in it. I think the fascination with spaghetti Eis is that it’s a sweet food made to look like a savory food. It like if you had an icecream sandwich that was made to look like a hamburger.
@@Odessa45 I´m from Virginia and my family is originally from Michigan, but it´s funny you mention it, becauseI have actually heard of this nursery before. My brother went to college with a guy with the same last name. I believe he was from NJ and that his family owns the farm. Small world!
This is my first video of yours, your English is almost perfect, the one thing I noticed, in English, we generally don't pluralize foreign words (yes we do, but mostly no) so spaghetti isn't pluralized, if you want to count them, we could say spaghetti noodleS
Spaghetti doesn't need to be pluralized. Spaghetti is the plural of spaghetto, which is itself a diminuative of spago, meaning thin string or twine. Italian is a fun language 🙂
In Britain we only call it ice cream, we get Ben and Jerrys everywhere. English ice cfeam tends to be the soft scoop type that you get from supermarkets, usually the normal flavours, vanilla, strawberry, chocolate and mint, often combinations and there are shops that sell more exotic flavours like rum and rasin, neopolitan (Vanilla, strawberry and chocolate sometimes mint instead of strawberry). We also get sorbet but that is like frozen, flavoured water.
Excatley my exprerience in the U.S. - even if italian ice cream is sold... Just one corection as I'm in Italy at the moment: it's Stracciatella with two Cs
@@FelifromGermany You're welcome. Thanks to Corona, Zoom-meetings with friends become very popular in Germany... and I even could join them from Italy. We had so much fun with your tongue twisters tonight. I'll sure have "nightmares" with the woodchuck...
Tya, and corection written in a correct English is correction. While exactly sounds better than Excatley and experience better than exprerience. Hoffentlich hab ich nicht auch noch einen Fehler rausgehauen. Drei davon in einer Linie, die die Rechtschreibung verbessern soll dürften aber schwerlich zu toppen sein. Nix (nichts) für ungut!
I don't know what gelato is, but there are at least three very different types of ice cream in the U.S. - hard ice cream and soft serve can be found almost everywhere (is gelato like soft serve?), but my favorite is a third type, frozen custard. Ice cream contains milk, cream, and sugar. (Soft serve ice cream has a lower fat content, so it is lighter and creamier.) Frozen custard also has egg yolks, making it richer and creamier.
Here in Seattle, we have a gelato shop that has stracciatella, and it's my favorite flavor of theirs. (Okay, that's only a half truth. It's my favorite flavor that they currently do. They used to do a chai gelato that I only had once, and it was to die for. I'm still hoping they bring it back.)
I had green tea icecream at a Japanese restaurant years ago (20 years?) and I was hooked. It was a horrific "seasick" green colour but tasted AMAZING. I've had green tea icecream in a few places now. Chai sounds interesting. Stracciatella with Nutella dribbled over it is my ultimate favourite.
Interesting topic. There is a difference between home-made, hand-churned ice cream and store-purchased ice cream. I can say that home-made is so like ice milk, which isn't sold anymore. I might suggest that profit margin may have something to do with it as container size has diminished but ice cream volume has been expanded by allowing more air into the product.
Softness of the ice cream partially depends on how much air got mixed into it when during the freezing process when it was made. Brands like Ben & Jerry's typically have less hair. Basically they spin the liquid ice cream mix well they are freezing it to incorporate some air. If they did not do this you would have something like a popsicle. Good trick to scoop out hard ice cream is the dip the scoop in some hot water shake the excess water off and then put the scoop in.
Hope you guys like the video! :) I totally forgot to mention that gelato also has less fat than ice cream. I had that in my notes but forgot to include it for some reason. So what do YOU prefer? American ice cream or gelato?
Clearly gelato. And the best gelato is cleary the italian one, i know it sounds like a common stereotype but it's the truth!😅
Gelato, Please never use this background you used for this video again.
@@JonDoe-yc6uz Thought it matched the topic
Just by the title I will have to visit German for the ice cream 😊
Much love for gelato. Gelato is what happens to ice cream when it is reincarnated into a higher form ❤
I think I can speak on from a rather unique perspective. My grandfather was an ice cream manufacturer in Meridian, Mississippi, in the 1920s-1960s, so when my family would go to visit I established a solid understanding for what good, non-mass-produced, American ice cream tasted like, All in the interests of science, of course.. Then, immediately after I raided his inventory for the last time at age 10, my family moved to Germany for three years, the first two at Erding and Freising, right near Feli's hometown. So at a fairly early age, I had a good basis for comparison. In the 1960s, I would say that German Eis had less variety of flavors than American (more to come on that in a moment), it was served softer, and the texture was a little lighter. I know now, but didn't then, that that was a function of a lower fat content. A cousin found a paper with my grandfather's base recipe, and the math works out to about 12% or so, which is at the low end the the modern range of Haagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry's. But German Eis was WAY more like American ice cream of the time than either one was like gelato. So I suspect that what's happened over the last 50-60 years is that German Eis has evolved toward gelato, while American ice cream has stayed more or less as it was. Which is better? Someone else got it right, I think: you usually prefer what you're used to. I like gelato fine--I like French glace better because I find it creamier. But good American ice cream has an emotional resonance for people who grew up on it. As to the modern variety of weird flavors: I personally prefer the classics, but even then on the small scale of his production my grandfather would have had 15 or so on offer at the soda fountain counter at any given time.
I used to work in Ice Cream in the UK. Whilst there they were trying to develop a "Euro Ice", something that could be sold all over the EU legally as "Ice Cream". not possible. Each state had their own legal definition. On the subject of soft/hard. Yes fat content but also type of fat, has a bearing but the ratio of mix to air is important ("Overrun") "Soft Scoop" has a lower melting point due to formulation, often containing glycerine.
For me it's more situation based. If I'm on vacation, if it's really hot or I'm just walking around town in the summer then I prefer Eis (usually a scoop of raspberry and a scoop of chocolate). If I'm home or sitting down in a restaurant then a bigger portion, all chocolate, with more textures and more fat sounds great (I LOVE Ben&Jerry's half baked).
I can honestly say I love European Eis, but I do love a creamy scoop of ice cream. It is a personal opinion but I find that in America we have so many brands of ice cream that are so much better then Ben and Jerry’s. I have found that I have my absolute favorite brand when we visit Texas and another in the area where we live.
I can also remember the delight as a teenager visiting family in Germany and experiencing Spaghetti Eis in Germany. It was iconic and just a special experience. Also, I find that in the state’s it is becoming more common to find Gelato at the grocery store. Still not the same as eating it at the parlor where it is freshly made.
I apologize for drawling on about the topic. Have a great day. 😊
@@martinaspohr2663 is there coulant in the U.S.?
Yes, We have Coulant in the US. It is one of my daughters favorite desserts. 😊
If you haven't had home-churned ice cream in the US, you should. Entirely different than store-bought or gelato. And yummmm!
Most USA Store bought ice creams aren't real ice cream, read the ingredients as they have lots of fillers that help it not melt as fast, for shipping. Get a bowl of real ice cream and the fake cheap stuff and let it sit for an hour. You will see the REAL ice cram with CREAM melts faster. You can get REAL ice creams from store but you will pay more. Always READ THE INGREDIENTS.
Still, it depends on whose grandmother's recipe you use,
Where do you buy ice cream that's churned in someone's home?
@@SocietyNeedsImprovement you can do this in your home and pay someone to help you! ruclips.net/video/Jo9KEGDs_Xs/видео.html
It is more healthy
As for serving temperature: Ideally, American Ice Cream is served the way you get it at an Ice Cream Shop; which is soft enough to eat immediately, but cold enough that you have at least a little time to do it. The rock hard stuff is what you get at a private home - where the freezer temperature is set without regard to the ideal serving temperature of the Ice Cream. Also, the stuff at the grocery is chilled hard so you can finish shopping and get it home before it melts. That said, it is still American IC and is different from German IC because it has a different composition.
* Ice cream - Milk + cream + sugar. More cream, less milk. More fat. Heavily churned.
* Gelato - Milk + cream + sugar. More milk, less cream. Less fat, more sugar. Lightly churned.
* Sorbet - Water + flavoring. NO dairy.
* Frozen yogurt - Lower in fat + yogurt cultures.
* Sherbet - Sorbet, but with milk.
* Custard - Ice cream + egg yolks.
* Soft serve - Basically gelato with more air incorporated into it.
Yep. Correcting the video, ice cream doesn’t have egg yolks (that’s custard) and has more cream and less milk (by volume) than gelato. That gives ice cream more butterfat, which, while giving it a smoother mouthfeel, makes it harder to taste the flavor (because the fat coats your tastebuds, desensitizing them to the ice cream flavor). I personally like that ice cream is colder, but gelato always seems to have a fuller, more intense flavor - a big plus for a frozen food.
Is there a collective term in English for all of these? In my native language, they fall into one broad category.
pawel1208 It would be something like “frozen desserts.”
The US is far more complex than Europe, we like a large assortment of frozen treats.
I wonder if British and Irish English speakers use these terms the same way Americans and Canadians do.
There is that perception among Europeans that "everything in America has peanut butter in it." It's just like to Americans, everything in Europe has hazelnuts in it.
The Dutch definitely put peanut butter in everything too! I love it and most Dutchies will bring their peanut butter on vacation in Germany!
@@bramjoziasse, is this the influence of former Dutch colonies like Indonesia?
That's because Hazelnuts are awesome, being a staple food going back to the stone ages.
I would argue, but it's hard to talk with my mouth full of peanut butter.
Mmmmm peanut butter
Saying gelato is better than ice cream is like saying cake is better than cookies. I’m eating em all, no further questions your honor.
With the exception of cheesecake, i think that cookies are BETTER than cake
@@PeakApex Cheesecake is pie, not cake. (But you're right, it is better.)
@@keithkannenberg7414 cheese cake is a cake and a pie
Hah! True
German Gelato factory worker here: our Gelato has at least 60% whole milk and is like cement too, if you get it out of the freezer at -18°C. Other than most other ice creams and gelatos here in Germany which contain much more air than our Gelato.
This instant creaminess usually comes from much air or smoothening substances
Why this isn't hearted is beyond me.
Negative 18 is about Zero Fahrenheit!
@@Cjnw It's the lowest temperature nearly all home freezers can reach in Europe.
Agreed. As an Italian, gelato you get in groceries stores will be usually hard out of the freezer compared to fresh gelato. And if I eat some when I get home after buying it, it's softer than when I take it out of my freezer, because it probably warmed up a bit while travelling.
So, the hardness isn't very indicative in my opinion because it's heavily dependant on temperature.
Intersting, I worked as a seller in a big food store in germany(also made my education there) and there I learned that regulare frozen food needs -18°c, but Ice/Ice Cream even -21°c. So I´m a bit confused about 18°c from someone who worked in the production of Ice Cream.
I eat Spaghettieis on a regular basis. 😆 An important ingredient you forgot to mention is the whipped cream below the "noodles". 😀😋
Yeah, that's why I love it so much... And because of the chocolate. 😋
I have never heard of Spaghettieis before viewing this vlog.
@@rebeccaquartieri5509 It's a staple in Germany! Vanilla isn't my favorite flavor (lemon is), but I always order Spaghettieis when the icecream truck shows up. :)
@Christopher Tetreault because then it's partly frozen and pure deliciousness
@Christopher Tetreault Because if you would put it on top, it would no longer look like Spaghetti.
If you ask Americans, "Why do you like ice cream over gelato?" many of them will respond with, "What's gelato?"
That is true.
I’m 60 years old, and I hadn’t even heard of gelato until about15 years ago. I’ve still never had it because It’s never been in the stores where I shop.
No. I’m American and I’ve known since I was little what gelato is.
@@josmith5419 I said "most," not "all." You're one guy.
yea, I have never had it.
Gelato comes in more simple flavours?
Do you know how difficult it is to catch and squash all the smurfs for Schlumpfeis? :-D
That's why it's not vegan 😎
@〰Mila〰
Blue moon icecream is called Schlumpfeis (Smurf ice cream) in Germany and very common for kids.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_moon_(ice_cream)
So I was joking about the name.
@@helloweener2007 Is blue Ice cream blueberry flavor if not what is it?
@@hydrolito
No, it has a very unnatural blue colour.
The colour is food colour. Children seems to like this blue.
The taste is very often vanilla or it is "bubble gum".
Well if you hired Gargamel that's your problem right there.
I'm German, and I love love love American ice cream! I wasn't really aware that ice cream and gelato were different things? And while I do love both, Ben & Jerry's is just something else. I'm obsessed with it!
Ben and Jerry's isn't really good.
We do have something very similar if not identical to straciatella in the US. It's called chocolate chip, and depending on the brand name, you're going to get either traditional chips are ribbon flakes. We even have mint chocolate chip! I think you have to go back to see how ice cream was originally made in the US, with real cream and rock salt. You can even make your own ice cream at home using more traditional methods. The best thing about ice cream, is the ability to make a root beer float, very refreshing on a hot summer day/
This creamy gelato in Germany is a super new invention, less than 20 years old. Back in the 80's I really got into trouble by trying to get the ice cream out of the box with one of my Grandma's silver spoons. Today the German "gelato" might be soft and smooth, but in the 70's or 80's or 90's it was hard as concrete like the american icecream is still today.
I think you and several other respondents are right about this. I lived in Europe from 1966-1970, and I don't recall any difference in the type of ice cream I had there compared to what I found in the US.
Ah, that explains why I am never astonished when I buy american ice cream and it is very hard coming out of the freezer. I am more astonished when I have "gelato" that isn't rock hard - but I am a german kid of the eighties
@@gepee3654 Germany is a very different place now than it was when I lived there in the late 1960's. Back then Germans only bathed once a week, if that. And they were fatter than Americans.
Yeah, because the fridge nearly had -20degrees Celsius. Thats why it was frozen like concrete.
@@wardandrew23412 On the other days, the washed. And now we know that's better for the skin biom. And ze enviroment ;-))
In most decent sized American cities you can find American style ice cream, gelato, frozen yogurt, and frozen custard. They each have a place in my heart and in my stomach!
That applies to everywhere, the strange thing felicia was talking about was, you have 4 different names for it. You cannot just take something cold in your mouth and eat it - first you have to research for the ingredients to know what you eat. It's icy, that's why it's ice ;-)
I prefer frozen custard
And: DQ Soft Serve, Wendy's Frosty, ICEE, 7-11 Slurpee and of course Sonic's desert menu! All the best food exists in America and we have the waste lines for proof!
@@holger_p why is that strange? They're describing different styles of frozen dairy-based non-yoghurt desserts.
What's with the frozen custard? Never heard of it. Consistency, flavors, why is different?
A lot of Americans also like soft serve.
Have you seen the classic Brazilian ice cream flick "2 girls 1 cup"?
It's weird that she didn't mention soft serve. She just talked about hard ice cream, right?
@@DerScheisse no just no
I was born in and grew up in the US but I still like to mash up my ice cream a bit before eating it. I find American ice cream too stiff and often I thaw it just a bit before even reaching for the scoop.
Frozen custard is also good. It's hard like regular American ice cream, but more creamy and rich. I think it's mostly a Midwestern thing though.
A reason I think we like the cement ice cream here in the south east is because it is so dang hot. We slowly, with a warm spoon after held under a warm stream of water at the kitchen sink, dig out the ice cream we desire into a bowl, then take our time putting the ice cream back in the freezer and getting a cold Coca-Cola out of the refrigerator to wash down the milky aftertaste and by the time we get to the couch in the living room, the ice cream has started to soften up enough to eat the softer edges first. 😋 mmmmmm I love Butter Pecan. And Black Walnut. And your videos.
i've never done the coca-cola thing (personally, for darker sodas, i prefer cream soda or butterbeer) but yeah, that's definitely one of the main reasons americans like "cement" ice cream
That was the most Southern thing I’ve seen in a while! Thank you!
The hard deep-freeze ice cream in the US is a recent thing, like since the 1950's. Its made with real full-on cream and is cooked a bit before churning it, designed for shipping and handling. When you make ice cream at home and hand churn it, most recipes use "half-and-half", or half cream half milk, and don't freeze it so hard. A poor-man's or budget ice cream for making at home is really "ice milk" - not far different than German gelato but less creamy and more crystalline. If you like German gelato, buy at American grocery stores "sherbet" - it is made with some dairy cream but has the same texture and smoothness as gelato and simpleness of flavors. A lot of Americans mix up "sherbet" with "sorbet", but a French style sorbet is almost like a frozen fruit smoothie and nothing like a sherbet. In an answer to hard-freeze ice cream being hard to handle at fast food places, Americans can up with "soft serve ice cream" -- think Dairy Queen cones or Wendy's Frostys.
If you were to put these on a scale most creamy to most crystalline, you can rank the various products as thus:
American Hard-freeze Ice Cream
American Homemade Ice Cream
American Sherbet / German Gelato
American Soft Serve Ice Cream
American Ice Milk
French-style Sorbet
Italian Ice
Some might argue that Sherbet and Soft Serve should be swapped in this list of creaminess scale.
@@b5wlol7rreesepeacemaybenot20 You quit cranking too soon. Also you should let it set in the ice/salt mixture for a few minutes after churning.
I have no idea where you got your info but its Wrong. It dates back to at least the 1870's, and is derived from the Philadelphia style IC. Some say it came with Scots in the 18 century. Check your facts.
@@b5wlol7rreesepeacemaybenot20 The makers of the home made ice cream you experienced are not churning their ice cream long enough -- my brother and I used to have to crank the ice cream maker in summer for anywhere from 2 hours to 4 hours adding ice and salt throughout the process (the salt is very important!) -- and then you need to freeze the container for and hour or so after you take the paddles out. At family gatherings, we would start the ice cream right after lunch so that it could go in freezer by dinner for consumption after dinner was done and the dishes done.
@@madmike5421 My information is quite correct. I lived in Ft. Wayne, IN, and worked at the Allen Dairy Farms Creamery -- now a part of Prairie Farm Dairies (now Progressive Dairies) -- home to several brands of ice cream including Allen Dairy Ice Cream, North Star Ice Cream and others. Later I worked at Edy's Creamery in town -- now Nestle Dreyer Creamery -- where several brands of ice cream were produced including Edy's Ice Cream, Dreyer's Ice and Meadow Gold Ice Cream. Fort Wayne was also home to Atz, makers of Atz Ice Cream and Puritan Ice Cream. In fact northern and central Indiana is the largest producer of ice cream second only to California. As an employee and history buff we learned a lot about how ice was made historically and how it changed. Most of the facilities had their start in the 1920's, and post-WW2 economics changed the way ice cream was produced and distributed. Edy's Slow Churned Ice Cream, introduced in the 1990's, harkens back to the older less dense softer ice cream of pre-WW2, though the emulsifiers used still produce a different product than in times back. If you have any more questions, I would start with this article: www.progressivedairy.com/blogs/guest-blog/from-the-diary-of-a-dairywoman-the-history-of-allen-dairy and look on Edys website.
@@scotthall2723 I remember when I was a kid back in the 1940's, My Uncle's idea of a wild Saturday night was home made ice cream and a bonfire with hot dogs and marshmallows. I'm sorry that those days are long gone.
Yes, there is also nothing like American soft serve or frozen custard. Dairy Queen Blizzards are also amazing.
The Carvelanche is also pretty nice.
I had vanilla soft serve when I was in Scotland and it was great
@@jessicalawrence7225 vanilla soft serve throughout Europe is delicious.
@@amitabhhajela681 not sure where you mean. I live in Spain and it’s non-existent.
Interesting. In Australia ice cream and gelato are generally seen as 2 different things. You can have one shop selling ice-cream right next door to a gelato shop.
That's how it started in the US but I think they're slowly merging, probably to eliminate competition from the other style.
I would imagine that's because ice cream and gelato are two completely different things
@Alabama Boi no. No its not. It is different all together
@Alabama Boi you realize I'm Italian right? LOL
@Alabama Boi your wrong even if you dont wanna be jackass
It's all "what you grew up with". Our ice cream is more like what we would make at home, for the family. We make it in a hand-cranked ice cream maker. I remember at family reunions, the men and boys were in charge of making the ice cream - taking our turns turning the crank until the ice cream was done. When it snows, we gather the fresh-fallen snow, add egg yolks, sugar and milk, to make "snow ice cream". We did this every winter, growing up! P.S. I am an American who hates peanut butter! I like the salted peanuts, just fine, however. I prefer American ice cream over gelato, any day, personally.
I'm an Australian who hates peanut butter. Can't stand the stuff. People look at me like I'm the devil incarnate if I say so.
I like the thicker icecream and I love gelato. I'll take any of it. One of my favourite toppings on icecream is Nutella. You're welcome.
I like peanut butter but not in ice cream. I like ice cream flavors that have a lot of chunks in them like a chocolate ice cream that has fudge threw it along with some brownie pieces.
Stracciatella fanboy here, it was invented in Bergamo, about 30 km from where I live. IMHO it's the best gelato ever!
Dead right there. And chocolate chip is the best flavor of ice cream. And it’s President Biden’s favorite.
My favourite too when in Germany, although quite a simple concept. Unfortunately rarely seen here in UK, at least not with the very fine chocolate bits. So I tend to make do with mint choc chip instead.
Feli did you forget to mention the popular "Wassereis" like the stuff form Langnese? I've never seen anything like that in the states!
Yes they exist! And I didn't forget, I just tried to limit the topic a little haha but they're called popsicles in the US
😂das gute alte Kaktuseis und der Flutsch-Finger
@@beneb9279 gab's immer im schwimmbad🤤
@@FelifromGermany Oh yes I forgot about those. It's been a long time for me. But the ones I had back in the day were meh at best when compared to European ones. Love ur vids btw, they are always so informative. Even to an Austrian who's lived in the states for many years.
@@beneb9279 dont forget about the "kratzeis" :D
one thing I would like to point out, if you go to an ice cream place there are two different types of ice cream you typically get, scooped hard ice cream(which is what you showed, which is what we get from the store) or soft serve ice cream, which you can only really get from certain ice cream shops. Its a different temperature and texture.
I love Graeters! I grew up in Ohio and have fond memories of getting it as a kid. Black Raspberry chip is a must.
Apples and Oranges. I like both. One thing though in US brands of ice cream; there is a lot a variation in product. Häagen-Dazs (sounds Danish, right? American actually) is extremely high in fat (cream), very rich. Ben and Jerry's is flavorful, but less rich. Blue Bell (Texas) has a really fantastic texture (especially their Dutch Chocolate). And then there are traditional stores like Basken Robbins with all those choices, half the fun putting multiple flavors together. Cheap brands tend to be a lot less fat content and thus less fullness in the mouth.
I like Gelato too, especially the tangy fruits which really erupt in your mouth. But they have a less fullness feel in the mouth than American Ice Cream (I grew up in Canada and ours was like American). I would say one difference is North Americans just grow up more milk oriented (drinking milk) than Europeans, that would be my best guess. Or it's like anything, you like what you grow up with. How can you explain why Americans like Root Beer? My wife (non-American) think it tastes like soap.
As to temperature. Traditionally ice cream is consumed mostly in Summer. On a hot day its a race, especiually for kids, to finish the ice cream before it melts. It's generally a lot hotter in the US than Europe so those extra degrees (with a larger US scoop) just might make it possible to get home without a screaming kids at the end.
I think that the difference are largely based in the (by our standards) poorer quality dairy products (cream and milk) at the base of the recipes. I remember trying Ben & Jerries and Haagen Daz after being told they were typical very high-end american ice creams and found them exactly the same as our 'normal' supermarket ice creams (worse in some cases), which are maybe 1/4- 1/3 of the price of the two american brands. People here buy them because of the brand, not the quality but they aren't huge sellers.
In Southern Europe they prefer gelato too and I don't think the summer there is colder than in the US.
Loving the different background imagery
In the UK I think we just call it all ice cream, but you know that there's different quality ones. Traditional ice cream places here (like at the seaside) will normally have mostly simple flavours plus a few weird ones. In supermarkets you get everything from Ben and Jerry's to basic own brand vanilla, chocolate or strawberry to traditional Cornish clotted cream ice cream.
Very interesting! My understanding is that American ice cream is frozen so as to prevent ice crystals from forming in it, which tends to ruin the texture. On the other hand, this makes it unsuitable for applications like ice-cream cones, milkshakes, etc., so the more-gelato-like 'soft-serve' ice-cream machine was invented. Another possible factor: American desserts often feature a hot, bakery item (pie, cake, brownies, etc) topped with a scoop of ice cream. A harder ice-cream resists melting longer, allowing the diner to enjoy the taste, texture AND temperature contrast of, say, a hot slice of apple pie, topped with a frozen scoop of vanilla ice cream. Soft-serve or gelato would turn to a puddle almost instantly in this application.
ok, none of your understanding of ice cream is right^^
the crystals form when it is too deep frozen and not moved. and all you say is just like an american pie...
isn't soft serve iced cream with air in it? This would make sense that freezing it later, would then introduce ice crystals; ruining the texture.
Soft serve ice cream is continuously churned by the machine to keep any large ice crystals from forming. That does trap the air too, but the air is not injected or anything like that.
@@jamesfrankiewicz5768 Carvel ice cream used to make soft serve ice cream. Commonly, it was believed that this was a lighter weight ice cream, as it had "air injected" into it to make it "fluffy." Soft serve ice cream from Carvel was also cheaper than hard ice cream which they also offered.
Burger King also had "soft serve" ice cream for a few years (I think they discontinued it), and can tell you for certain, it injected air into the ice cream. I had to repair the machine on nearly a daily basis (which is probably why it was discontinued).
@@Leon-wz1js what you refer to soft serve ice cream seems to me "Soft-Eis" as we call it in Germany. This type of ice cream is not scooped but comes out of a machine with air pressure through a tubing and filled into a cone. There is air in it, or better said nitrogen, which also serves to freeze the liquid in the machine on the way out.
A LOT of these relatively minor differences in prepared foods occurred in the middle of the 20th century in America, and were reflective of the need to get products to suburban and rural supermarkets hundreds (or even thousands) of miles away from where they were produced. (and thus reflected the dramatic difference in American and European population densities.) Perhaps the "American variant" simply traveled better, or was easier to produce in factories circa 1945. From there, this style of Ice cream simply became popular as people grew up with it. I'm in my late 30's and I can't tell much difference in the quality of ice cream available in higher end supermarket brands and that available at dedicated Ice Cream Parlors (Like Baskin Robbins) but I have heard my baby boomer parents say that this was NOT always the case: They said supermarket Ice cream from the 1960's and 1970's was "mass produced dreck."
Also: I think we DO have a version of what you call straciatella: seems a lot like what we call "chocolate chip." It's not very popular anymore but it is still available. (We used to have more simple Ice Cream flavors here too-- all these crazy exotic flavor combinations really became popular in about the 1990s.)
Thanks and I really enjoy your videos!
At a guess, I’d say we Americans prefer our “cement” ice cream to the softer gelato varieties for the same reason we have air conditioning in our homes, because it gets much hotter in the summer here. Soft ice cream is going to turn into flavored milk in a hurry on a hot summer day.
Concrete ice cream at Culvers.
But countries like Italy, Spain or even Turkey prefer Gelato and there it is pretty hot in summer (in some regions of Germany too).
@@IzumixXxchan They know only their country :P
@@IzumixXxchan Not as hot as Austin Texas, Phoenix Arizona, or Palm Springs California.
@@Calphool222 It is. And sometimes hotter. Even in Germany sometimes the temperature reaches more than 40°C.
It's true that Americans love peanut butter and we put it in everything. I just eat it off a spoon sometimes (one big scoop...no double dipping). If the rest of the world doesn't want to get onboard with that then fine...more delicious salty peanut butter for us.
I microwave peanut butter and put in on ice cream.
Yessss
The Dutch put peanut sauce on top of their fries! You might want to try it.
Also as an experiment, try to put nutella and peanut butter in everything for a month, and let your doctor watch over the experiment.
Report if you approached death twice as fast in that time.
We do NOT put peanut butter in everything! I don't put it on any meat I cook, in mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, broccoli, spaghetti, etcl.
In Israel we call the soft serve ice cream "American ice cream" 😂
I actually never thought there was a difference between gelato and ice cream, I just thought gelato was the italian name for ice cream and that Ben&Jerry's specifically are just dense and frozen but never felt it was a different texture or anything...
For me they are all basically the same 🤷🤤😋
" I just thought gelato was the italian name for ice cream" - it is ... but the way gelato is made vs icecream, they are different. I've actually found that icecreams are all slightly different in many countries.
I am Australian, but lived in Münster for years. I was amazed by the ice cream culture. There were tiny ice cream shops all over the place and people would eat it while walking around, even during the winter. It wasn’t long before I was doing it too!😀
As a german i love american ice cream. I always hated my ice cream melting quickly and getting runny. I'll bend all my spoons for ben & jerry's!
Karamell Sutra 😍😍😍😍😍
I think u covered the whole topic why Americans love us ice cream an not gelato
Half baked
@@cannotwaittoseedavanteadam4301 Half Baked is ok, caramel Sutra is awesome
@@wandilismus8726 You got awesome and ok mixed up.
I lived in Germany as a child and 30 yrs later I still remember the taste of Mr. Getty's banana ice cream (gelato) and the small sugar cones. Sooo good!
must be some kind of american story. never heard of a mr getty. i am in germany since the beginning of the 80s. could you pls tell me, who this mr getty is?
@@bobabier5394 This does sound odd seeing as Getty isn't even a German surname.
Nothing better than homemade ice cream with cream right from the cow, using a hand crank. Yummm!
Now youre talking!! Cranked many a freezer in my life.
You are so right!!!!
The very best!!!
Rick Argotsinger
I kept hearing this while I was growing up, but when I finally tried it, I learned that store-bought ice cream is much better.I guess it's the romance of home-made that gets you.
I think it's more the flavor and freshness. I remember my grandmother killing the chickens that we ate for supper, too. Yummy!
When I would visit the German (then girlfriend, now wife) I always liked the smaller scoops, because you could get them for 1 euro each (I'm sure it's more now, I didn't pay attention). Though while at Sylt, a damn seagull mugged me (flew from behind me, over my shoulder, and knocked my ice cream from off my cone, and he and his seagull friends ate it up off the ground). The wife and her sister to this day laugh their ass off about that...
Always liked getting the Langnese containers at the grocery store in Germany, it wasn't a frozen block, but little mounds with toppings rather than "I guess there are chocolate and cherries mixed in there".
One difference I noticed with the wife, and we often have (teasing) arguments is about what we Americans in general call bread. Germans love their bread, and have many different types, while Americans usually are talking about sandwich bread. But Germans don't make their sandwiches out of that. They do have something that looks like sliced bread, but it's only used for toast, hence, it is called toast. But (my argument) it's not toasted yet, so it can't be toast! So she'll say something along the lines of give her a slice of toast, and I'm about to put it in the toaster, and she's like what are you doing? (Me) You said you wanted toast, I'm toasting it. (German wife) No, I don't want it toasted, I just want the slice. (Me) Oh, so you wanted bread, why didn't you say that? (GW) We have bread, where is it? (Me) Here. (GW) No, that's toast! (Me) It can't be, it's not toasted yet!
In the end, I have coined it untoasted toast...
My mom way back in the day made homemade bread. It was Swedish rye bread which doesn't taste like rye bread at all. It was my dad's mom's recipe. She made it every christmas season. The recipe made enough for our household and gifts for our neighbors.
There are still places where you can get 1 euro scoops in Germany!
When I was a child a scoop was 20 Pf (10 cent) ;)
About the Toast thing: I'm German and I had this argument with my younger brother more than once. He is teasing me by calling it "ungetoastest Toast" (untoasted toast). I would refer to it as Weißbrot (white bread) but it's true that the common word for it is Toastbrot, even when it's not toasted.
@@Henning_Rech True, the price was only 1/10 of todays price, but peoples income is on average 10 times higher now and the scoopes significantly increased in size. So on average you get more ice cream now per hour of work than a few decades ago. In other words: The purchasing power of peoples income measured in liters of ice cream increased over time.
They do Peanutbutter in everything? Omg, i have to move to the States. I love Peanutbutter.
Yes we even have Peanutbutter flavored Alcohol.
Want to enjoy peanut butter to the limit? Go to Georgia (or is it Georgea?), the state above Florida and below South Carolina.
Yes... true story when I was little someone broke into our house and stole a lot of things. They took our microwave and me and my sisters were so upset because in that microwave was... you guessed it. Our jar of peanut butter 😂🤣😂 we literally cried because our peanut butter was stolen lol
@@stakeoutrockhound523 it is Georgia, and it is to the West of South Carolina not below 😉
My personal favorite are Reece's Peanut Butter Cups.
Cincinnati has Graeters which is made differently from other traditional ice creams in the US. It uses the French pot method which incorporates less air. Growing up we didn’t have gelato available in the grocery store so I prefer it because it’s what I grew up with. (Though as a Cincinnati native I really love Graeters)
I agree the first time I tried gelato I was like "What magic is this?" 😍
I'm 48 I live in northern California and I don't think I've ever had gelato, I'll have to give it a try this week. :-)
Really? I'm also in Northern California and most grocery stores ( at least around here) carry it though the selection is very limited
I've bought gelato many times and it's soooooo good!
If you’re in Cincinnati, you should check out Graeter’s (if you haven’t already). Yes, it’s American style, but they’re based in Cincy, and their salted caramel is to die for.
Also, for me as a midwestern American who vastly prefers a texture similar to gelato, frozen custard, like at Culver’s, is the way to go!
The "Spaghettieis" is a German invention! A young ice cream creator came up with this idea, but it flopped at its first tries. Most customers thought that actual spaghettis were used and this imagination is of course is kinda disgusting... But it became more and more popular after a few years. Luckily, the inventor forgot to protect the idea by patent so every ice cream parlor could serve it and make different variations.
Yes but he was or is (he is still alive) an Italian immigrant. But because he used a spaetzle ricer, Germany technology is somehow involved.
Thanks Swabia.
You can get now also other "fake italian dish" eis in these ice cream parlor, like Pizza-Eis and Lasagne-Eis which are things made to look like pizza and lasagne using ice cream, fruits and fruit sauces.
Just FYI, in English, "spaghetti" is already plural, so no s on the end.
Ben and Jerry’s bad sample. Is fairly recent to US. Horrid. Did not exist when I was young . Became popular without. My help
But ain't it disgusting anyway to mingle dough with gelato?
This USA guy says, "Gelato is sooooo delicious." When I was in Italy, my friend made fun of me because I ate so much gelato (I deserved the teasing. Haha).
I've known about gelato for a long time, but I had no idea that it was the default ice cream in Europe until now. Very educational video!
I'm from Germany and i love Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s. 😍
I think it is another kind of ice cream than gelato and difficult to compare.
Karamell Sutra 😍😍😍😍
You are right. They are, aside from both being frozen, completely different. Gelato is more fruit based, meanwhile (North American) ice cream (and frozen custard) is almost entirely dairy based.
In the UK we actually mostly eat the "American" type ice cream. Gelato only became available in the last 10 years... To be honest I prefer the American style, because you get a better melt in your mouth feeling. Gelato is already soft, and stays pretty thick even when melted. Ice cream goes from solid to thin liquid.
Same in Belgium.
In Sweden too, so when she says Europe she is wrong.
Can confirm. In the UK ice cream is what you might call American ice cream. Gelato is always called gelato. I wonder if American ice cream is really British ice cream.
I have at least 2 pints of ice cream per week. Love it. Always take your pint of B&J or HD or Graeters (Graeters is made in OH and is by far the best ice cream you can get) out of the freezer and put it in the microwave for 30 seconds. then it's perfect. I'm going to the market now and try some gelato now.
Well as a German I just see Ice-cream and Gelato as sub categories of *Speiseeis* . One is soft (weich -> luftig) the other hard (fest -> dicht).
Also *Softeis* (that's how I know it) comes to my mind which I'd say is another sub cat. of Speiseeis. It's kind of an instant Ice-cream from a machine, very creamy and as I know it more artificial (less/no chance of finding real fruits or natural ingredients in it) than *Speiseeis* .
Some people blaim the food industry to include more air into the ice-cream to increasing the volume while keeping its weight (900ml weighing only 500g). Might be true, but I don't mind cause I like it being soft 😁
Damn - now I want ice-cream 😳
All the best Feli 🤗
Sofeis is what we call "soft serve" in America. It legally can't be called ice cream because it doesn't have enough fat content.
I love this channel. Always brings a smile to my face.
Gruss Gott Feli. Not sure you'll see this since it's two years after you made this video, but American ice cream was quite the hot-item in Germany at any German-American Fest that sold it. The lines at the American ice cream stands were unbelievable. I lived in Germany from 1992 to 1994 and this was universally true no matter what G-A Fest I went to, whether it was in Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, Augsburg, and others. Of course, taste in personal, and a big difference can also be texture. What you loved growing up can be a hard thing to let go of. There are many things I would rather eat in Germany than the U.S., e.g. bread, salad (a house salad before a meal in a restaurant, zwiebelkuchen (oh how I miss this), and a several other things--the point is, I loved the food in Germany. But ice cream? Hands down American ice cream is better (for me, of course). Naturally, it has to be good quality ice cream. Crap ice cream/eis/gelato in any country is going to taste like crap. Americans as you've already figured out like sugar, so more sugar is better. American ice cream is also denser and more fulfilling. And like many of your followers have already suggested, homemade ice cream is amazing. You might like that a lot more because when you eat it after it's freshly made, it's much softer--so you'd probably like the texture more.
Keep up the good work with your videos. They're lots of fun for an old retired veteran who thought of Germany as his Lieblingsland. Tschuss.
Was the long lines function of public curiosity versus a better product? When traveling to Europe a adult person from the states would eat gelato
I was today years old when I first heard about spaghetti ice.
I was stationed in Germany in the 80's and have never tasted anything like what I ate a few times in downtown Heilbronn--spaghettieis is SO good! The consistency of the ice cream is sort of gravelly, and just delicious. There isn't anything like it in the US. That it's basically a strawberry sundae in the shape of a plate of spaghetti is just a bonus!
The thing I missed the most, when being in the US for a longer time: A nice loaf of bread, something dark, with a lot of seeds, instead of the white sugar bombs they call bread ;-D
Must have been a while ago, because most supermarkets have an ample supply of hearty breads with different nuts and seeds.
lol sugar bombs :D I especially like potato bread
Last time I was in the US (two years ago) the bread which you're referring to still couldn't hold a candle to German bread quality and varieties
@@NiklasMiroll Guess I must plan a trip to the local german bakery when it opens back up :P! Hopefully it survives the pandemic.
@@NiklasMiroll It all depends on where you go. There are small mom and pop artisan bakeries that produce some great loaves of bread. Most ethnic groups in the United States tend to have their own bakeries in their neighborhoods.
The ice cream we buy in stores is usually hard ice cream which originated in Phila. NYC is the place of origin for soft serve or frozen custard. We also have water ice and gelato here at roadside stands
Americans need to learn about German Bakeries!! Mohn is the best!!
What's Möhn? You mean Mohn (corn poppy)?
Poppy seed.
Age 0 thru 10 I lived over a German bakery that my Grandfather & his Brother built/started.(In the USA)
I'd gladly settle for some authentic brötchen
americans adding umlauts to every german word lol
Eisdiele sounds like an ice dealer (which makes sense) but makes me think of some shady character making side deals of sweetened cream products down dark alleys. Oh, there’s stracciatella in the states, just not as popularly unfortunately.
I was thinking the same. May have to start referring to ice cream shops as ice dealers.
Since one translation for Diele is deal (plank). You are not so wrong.
Diele is an interesting word. It means plank but it can also mean hallway or simply room.
No idea why ice cream parlors are called diele though
I dont know if deal as in sell is related to deal as in plank. If not there is no connection between the German word Eisdiele to deal
@@not-a-theist8251 i think its called so bc of the plank at the widow, where ice cream is usally sol in europe, if u want to get a scoop u dont need to got into the store, ther is in most times a window where u can order ur takeaways
American ice cream changed about 15-20 years ago. Old single farm ice cream was rich and thick. New bulk brands started using more milk to get a consistent texture, and churning faster to add volume to their ice cream. The closer you get to old dairy farms in America, the more cream you would find in your ice cream. By using milk and whipping their ice cream, big brands like Ben and Jerry's could sell the same volume for less. After a couple years, it was just too much for single dairy farms to keep up with full cream ice cream. Like someone said before, many parts of America get hot enough that ice cream needs to be a little bit colder in order to give you enough time to eat it.
'Nother great topic - thanks! Near where I live in Massachusetts, we DO have a place nearby that sells home-made gelato that is wonderful and Stracciacella is indeed one of the flavors sold. I fell in love with it when we visited Italy a couple of years ago. However, I do love good quality American ice cream as well, and we have some wonderful places that serve it close to where I live, where there's always a line. Just like good quality bread (I make a mean homemade 100% rye sourdough Bauernbrot :) -- I think there's a huge difference in the quality of ice cream as well if it's homemade.
Very true homemade is made with sugar and real vanilla not high fructose corn syrup and imitation vanilla. And I'm pretty sure we had quite a bit of milk in the custard before we would add the cream. If you cranked the freezer you got to lick the paddle.
If you lived in the deep south. You would understand why we like our ice cream the way it is. Gelato is not gonna stand up in southern heat.
As a person from, and currently in, the southern heat (gulf coast, at that), I'm forced to agree. Otherwise, I might evaporate or melt. :-D
Well it works for the south of Italy 🇮🇹
We just use frezzers 🤷♂️
@@hansmeyer7225 28°C isn't hot. 38°C+ is
@@m_soko and its 38 next weekend as well in south italy so whats your point ?
@@hansmeyer7225 But Italy is further north than many Southern & Southwestern US states. Texas and Florida, for example, are really more parallel to North Africa.
I’ve never heard of jellato, and I really don’t know what you’re talking about, but there’s a lot of diversity in ice cream in the states. Soft serve vs hand dipped, for instance. And most ice cream is kept at whatever temperature all the other things in that particular freezer are kept at, which might be very cold or quite warm. But I understand that you’re speaking of your limited personal experience, so I get that.
Home made ice cream in t the US is slow churned ( by hand) and is smooth, denser and softer consistency than grocery store ice cream. My suspicion is that American ice cream has more cream and eggs due to the easy availability of those ingredients in dairy farms in the early American life but I defer to anyone who has more information. I believe the high speed of churning and increased inclusion of air is based on industrial economics of profitability. My mother, who grew up on a farm in the early 1900s called our ice cream "frozen custard".
Actual frozen custard used to be more widely available but still is in urban areas. Or at Shake Shack, which started in New York City. It starts with a cooked egg and milk custard. If you buy French Vanilla ice cream, which should have egg yolks, you are half way there.
We have tons of gelateria’s in the US and you can usually find both, as well as sorbet at grocery stores
Thanks for the tip. I've actually never specifically looked for gelato at the store. I'll try next time.
I like both gelato and ice cream, though in my opinion it’s the extra milk that makes ice cream more creamy than gelato. Also, here in the U.S. we also have a whole separate type of ice cream called “soft serve” that is completely different from the traditional ice cream. And it typically comes in traditional flavors like chocolate, vanilla, or swirl which is both chocolate and vanilla together and it’s squeezed out of a machine right onto a cone or into a cup. We tend to put sprinkles on the top. This is super popular in food trucks or stands and are a summer staple. ❤
Now I need this spaghettieis
I had it a couple of times years ago. No big deal at all.
same, I'm very curious about it
Actually I remember that we also had to let the ice cream sit for a few minutes before being able to scoop it into a bowl when I was a child (in Germany). Nowadays we dont have to do that anymore.
Yes, same in Sweden. I remember I actually thought the freezer was broken the first time I got a carton of icecream at home that wasn't a block of cement. Now they are all soft, except for the american brands.
They put a lot more ingredients in the ice cream these days to make it softer. If you know too many details about the ingredients, you don't want to eat it anymore.
Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla. To die for! I guess I will have to find some gelotto to try it.
My favorite part of travelling through Europe is gelato. Missing that this year.
You need to try a root beer float. I don't think it would work with gelato.
Haagendaas and Graeters are made and stored at lower temperatures. Breiers is much softer like your ice cream. The texture and hardness is dependent upon how much milk fat it contains. At one time ice milk was popular here which was made with skimmed milk. That one tasted like you were eating ice. You can also get soft serve ice cream from Dairy Queen. You have to go outside Cincinnati to readily get it. Kroger’s? My favorite is extreme maximum fudge moose tracks ice cream. You can also go to cold stone creamery and get practically anything made to order for what it contains. Later.
Gelato tastes like melted ice cream to me. When I was an exchange student in Sweden in the mid 1980's we had ice cream novelties bars, indiviual cones, etc. rather than a bowl of ice cream so no comparison there. But I prefer five ingredient ice cream like our favorite Aldi's (German origin retailer) Super Premium ice cream which contains cream, milk, sugar, pasteurized egg yolks, and chocolate or vanilla bean. Please no extra "enhancers" in my ice cream like you will find in other brands like Breyers, Edy's that make the ice cream creamier and softer. I prefer an ice cream that I can chew. Wow, I am so American, I can hear you laughing Felicia! LOL!! 🤣
William W., I am with you on the 5 ingredients! I'm that person in the grocery store standing in front of the freezer case reading the ingredients on the ice cream containers. I look for the ingredients you listed: cream, (possibly) milk, sugar, (possibly) egg yolk, and the flavor. There really should not be any other ingredient put in! This "5 ingredient" ice cream is more expensive, but it's better quality.
Ben and Jerry's and Hägendasz actually tastes great to me and I'm German^^
Many U.S. product availability is based on profit. They give us what makes them the most money. I'll bet this is one major reason for our version of ice cream. Also going back a few decades we also had mainly the basic flavors of ice cream. Then there was some experimentation to produce what we could custom order at a shop but available in stores. That led to an explosion of flavors as producers tried to increase sales. Fortunately much of the result is tasty! Never had much chance to try gelato but sure will go find some soon thanks to you! Thanks!!
- In the USA, gelato and sherbert are very similar.
- American ice cream does not need to be kept at 12 degrees F. Holy cow, everything is hard as a brick at that temperature. The freezer in my kitchen is set around 20-22F, plenty cold for everything that needs to be kept frozen. As a result, ice cream is easier to scoop.
- Ben & Jerry's came up with all those complicated flavors. When I was growing up back in the Stone Age we had vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and rocky road. Then someone introduced chocolate chips. Then Baskin Robbins introduced 31 flavors, none of which were anything like Ben & Jerry's goofy combinations. They were just additional fruit flavors flavors, plus mint. And a few swirls.
Not sure how old you are, but I was a kid in the 80s and while complicated/exotic flavors took off with Ben & Jerrys I do remember a good amount of variety at least in ice cream shops. Between Baskin Robbins and Thrifty (which may be a regional thing) there were the flavors you mentioned and others like cookies and cream, jamoca almond fudge, butter pecan, and rainbow sherbert. I do think it's an American thing to push the envelope on flavor combinations, whether it be ice cream, pizza, burgers, or whatever.
I'm only 49, but I'm pretty sure chocolate chip came before rocky road. Hell, I remember in the '80's when Weird Al came out with the song, I had zero clue WTF "Rocky Road" even was...
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And even in the '70's we had Friendlies. I think the first non-grocers ice cream I ever had was their black raspberry... though NOTHING is as good as their peppermint stick.
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Though to be fair, I never even HEARD of Baskin Robbins until the '90's... probably because there were none in New England. You wanted sit-down hard ice cream you went to Friendlies or HoJo's.
Makes me sad, HoJo's is gone, and BOTH Friendlies locations here went under.
@@jasonknight1085 rocky road has been around since at least 1929.
I lived in four very different countries by the time I was ten (Indonesia, Holland, Germany, and finally the US). What I discovered each time we emigrated to a new country was that I found the food there nearly unpalatable at first, especially German food. Food preferences are formed early in life, and it takes a long time to change them. I suspect this is the reason so many Americans prefer the type of "hard" ice cream commonly sold here, and why Europeans prefer the "gelato" style ice cream.
It gets much hotter here in the USA. By the time we get it, we mostly want it to cool off.
This is so true. Children actually begin becoming familiar with their native culture's food months before birth. So by the time we are born we already have a preference for the flavors mom ate, lol!
@@kurarisusa Interesting. After 50 years of living in Western countries, I've pretty much acclimated to most Western foods, but I still prefer Asian dishes. That's what I spent the first six years of my life eating, so my brain may have become "wired" for that kind of cuisine.
Andrew Ward - ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, winner. We like what we like for the same reason she likes what she likes.
Guess it depends on what you started from/are used to.
Gelato's kinda weird,
maybe something exotic to try when tired of ice cream. This from someone who had to hand crank an ice cream machine with ice and rock salt during the summer to get any to eat,
and now has multiple (6?) machines one inherited with compressor freezer but discontinued (missing knob), freeze bowls (most), motors, a couple ice and salt motored, old school, etc. Ideally find an old mechanical and hook up to a bicycle, earn the calories/+burn off
I was reading through a French travel book about America. And given the rather fussy nature of the French love of food you'd think they wouldn't have much to say about American foods. But two things they thought were exceptional, the many regional hamburgers and ... ice cream. They thought the USA was a paradise for ice cream. Not just Ben and Jerry's and Hagen Daz, but there was Baskin and Robbins 31 flavors, there are endless ice cream brands, and don't forget PUMPKIN ICE CREAM in October!!! Seriously there must easily be more than a hundred flavors of ice cream in America. (Butter Brickle anyone?) So if the French say it's pretty danged good.... And don't even think of substituting gelato (which I do love as well, but hey we have that too) for American ice cream to the women of America. It won't be pretty. Thanks Felicia!
In the end I think it all came down to what kind and how much milk was available at the time. Some places have cows that have much higher cream content in the milk as well as during some of the wars or just down economies made milk much more expensive and the only way to keep milk for long term use was to freeze it so when the general population couldn't afford to buy a lot of milk the farmers began selling it to Ic manufacturers so it would not be wasted and that is when the more creamy smooth Ic or American Ice cream began to change. Somewhere in the late 50s and early 60s would be my guess. Love your channel.
The colder ice cream gives you a head start on eating it before it melts all over the place when outside in the summer.
As a 54 year old American, I can tell you that I grew up eating home-made ice cream whenever I went to my grandmother’s house. It’s nothing like store-bought ice cream.
I’ve had plenty of Gelato in my travels in Europe (including living in Belgium for almost eight years), and back here in the US I still prefer to have good Gelato rather than most American ice cream brands. But even though it’s Gelato, it’s still hard as a rock when I get it out of the freezer. Our freezers are just set to a lower temperature than you’re used to in Europe.
True. I think (maybe?) Americans tend to store and freeze more foods than in Europe. We might to go the market here twice a month to stock up and tend to buy in bigger quantities that need to be stored for longer. From what I understand about the European way of grocery shopping is more like buying whatever strikes your fancy for that day, where in America (especially in rural and suburban America), we might be stocking up for weeks when we go to the store. In Europe you might be using freezers for storing leftovers you cooked today or things you will be cooking tomorrow or the next day, but in the US we're using freezers for things we might be cooking in two weeks. I'm a single guy and even I have two freezers because of this and also because I store vac-sealed meat, salmon, seafood etc at lower temperatures for longer periods than ice cream and leftovers.
@@vikingshark2634 Americans hoard food like no other, which is why we have chest freezers, large fridges, and large pantries. We buy in bulk and visit the store less often. American food also has a longer shelf life.
Spaghetti Eis sounds awesome. A British lady visiting the US loved our root beer so much, she asked me to mail it to her.
As an american... I find gelato too light and fluffy as opposed to american ice cream, like I'm eating air. XD the spageteis just sounds fun and different.
Actually there is more air in American ice cream, gelato is just softer but also denser. But I find it also quite hard to find good tasting gelato in the US
@@thomastschetchkovic5726 then I may have never had real traditional gelato. Just talenti brand that comes in the clear container with the brown lid. Any recommendations?
Regardless of the reality, this is how it feels to me too...so fluffy feeling (which I commented just now before I even saw this comment!).
Hmmm, interesting. I'm from the UK, and B&J and HD ice-creams always did feel "too hard", but I figured it was specific to the brands and not just because they were American. But most people consider them approximately equal to UK ice-cream, and there's no different name or anything.
Flavourwise, we'd traditionally only have vanilla, strawberry and chocolate. Then there was a 3-flavour variant, with all three in stripes, and about the same time mint-choc-chip became popular. At some point we started getting things like cookies-and-cream in take-away ice cream parlours and then a plethora of other flavours, but these were pretty much always normal soft style, but maybe I just accepted American flavours as being harder because they were full of lumps of biscuit or whatever. Traditional Devonshire ice-cream is amazing - it's so creamy, it's unlike pretty much any flavour you can get anywhere else, and super tasty.
Girl, you need some Blue Bell Brand made in Texas (Vanilla or Cookies and Cream flavors), or a good old fashioned Soft Serve Cone from Dairy Queen! ❤
I loved Blue Bell’s banana pudding ice cream when I lived in the south. Blue Bell doesn’t seem to be very popular on the east coast.
Last time I was this early for something I was born prematurely
I was in West Germany in the 1980s and took a Rhine River tour. Before we got back to the base, Pirmasens, the bus broke down in a little village. I don't recall the name, but it was late and there was an ice cream shop open down the street. We waited for help to arrive by drinking beer and having a blast with real German people. Not the big city folks or the ones that were near military installations.
The American ice cream we know today came about at a Worlds Fair which took place in the late 1800's to early 1900's. They made the ice cream airy and hard so it wouldn't melt as fast in the summer heat. This is the story I've heard. Can't confirm it, but it makes sense.
Philadelphia Centennial Worlds Fair, 1876, and the introduction of the home ice cream hand crank churner. That Philly style non-cooked ice cream, the same kind Breyers® of Philadelphia also produced, which dominated the markets with the introduction of the frozen foods sections, is the very much basis of standard American style Ice Cream.
Haha this is funny timing. Just the other day I said to my husband, “i want ice cream but not the soft mushy stuff” (American living in Germany here). Normally I like German ice cream ok, but I was definitely craving the thick, creamy American ice cream on that day. If given the choice though, I’d choose the American kind almost every time. It’s a texture thing for me. I prefer it thicker and with chunks of cookies or cookie dough, etc in it.
I think the fascination with spaghetti Eis is that it’s a sweet food made to look like a savory food. It like if you had an icecream sandwich that was made to look like a hamburger.
HA! Robyn, are you or your family from New Jersey by chance? I grew up 10 minutes from "Van Wingerden Farms" in Jersey
@@Odessa45 I´m from Virginia and my family is originally from Michigan, but it´s funny you mention it, becauseI have actually heard of this nursery before. My brother went to college with a guy with the same last name. I believe he was from NJ and that his family owns the farm. Small world!
This is my first video of yours, your English is almost perfect, the one thing I noticed, in English, we generally don't pluralize foreign words (yes we do, but mostly no) so spaghetti isn't pluralized, if you want to count them, we could say spaghetti noodleS
Spaghetti doesn't need to be pluralized. Spaghetti is the plural of spaghetto, which is itself a diminuative of spago, meaning thin string or twine.
Italian is a fun language 🙂
She didn't pluralize it, it is spaghettieis, or in English spaghetti ice
@@georgebawkin9768 she was speaking about spaghetti noodles at the point I was referring, not the spaghettieis
In Britain we only call it ice cream, we get Ben and Jerrys everywhere. English ice cfeam tends to be the soft scoop type that you get from supermarkets, usually the normal flavours, vanilla, strawberry, chocolate and mint, often combinations and there are shops that sell more exotic flavours like rum and rasin, neopolitan (Vanilla, strawberry and chocolate sometimes mint instead of strawberry). We also get sorbet but that is like frozen, flavoured water.
Excatley my exprerience in the U.S. - even if italian ice cream is sold... Just one corection as I'm in Italy at the moment: it's Stracciatella with two Cs
Oh damn, I can't get any video done without a typo 🙈 Thanks for pointing it out!
@@FelifromGermany You're welcome. Thanks to Corona, Zoom-meetings with friends become very popular in Germany... and I even could join them from Italy. We had so much fun with your tongue twisters tonight. I'll sure have "nightmares" with the woodchuck...
Tya, and corection written in a correct English is correction. While exactly sounds better than Excatley and experience better than exprerience.
Hoffentlich hab ich nicht auch noch einen Fehler rausgehauen. Drei davon in einer Linie, die die Rechtschreibung verbessern soll dürften aber schwerlich zu toppen sein. Nix (nichts) für ungut!
Cement, huh? It's why I put my ice cream in the microwave for about 10 seconds. I bet you never heard of that before!! lol
Cool background!!
I do mine for 45 seconds
I do the same thing if I am in a hurry.
yeah. lol.
ice cream in a microwave... you get the joke, do you?
i mean... wtf is that made of what you call ice cream? :D
18 seconds. Exactly 18....
I don't know what gelato is, but there are at least three very different types of ice cream in the U.S. - hard ice cream and soft serve can be found almost everywhere (is gelato like soft serve?), but my favorite is a third type, frozen custard. Ice cream contains milk, cream, and sugar. (Soft serve ice cream has a lower fat content, so it is lighter and creamier.) Frozen custard also has egg yolks, making it richer and creamier.
Here in Seattle, we have a gelato shop that has stracciatella, and it's my favorite flavor of theirs. (Okay, that's only a half truth. It's my favorite flavor that they currently do. They used to do a chai gelato that I only had once, and it was to die for. I'm still hoping they bring it back.)
I had green tea icecream at a Japanese restaurant years ago (20 years?) and I was hooked. It was a horrific "seasick" green colour but tasted AMAZING. I've had green tea icecream in a few places now. Chai sounds interesting. Stracciatella with Nutella dribbled over it is my ultimate favourite.
ok... this might be weird... but Eis was my first word i learned i german
(aside fro hallo, ja, and nein lol)
Well that makes sense, you have to know how to find ice cream wherever you go. Priorities.
VivaCohen Exactly. I would say it’s the most important word to know 😂😂
Interesting topic. There is a difference between home-made, hand-churned ice cream and store-purchased ice cream. I can say that home-made is so like ice milk, which isn't sold anymore. I might suggest that profit margin may have something to do with it as container size has diminished but ice cream volume has been expanded by allowing more air into the product.
I'm old enough to remember the "ice milk'" experiment in I think the 60's. It was of course awful and thankfully didn't last long.
Ice milk is still sold and the few Ponderosa Steak Houses that still exist have it in the machines and not soft serve ice cream.
It lasted in stored in to the 90’s
I liked vanilla ice milk as a kid in the 60s. Thanks for reminding me. I probably wouldn't like it much now.
Isn't Dairy Queen ice milk?
You need to try Blue Bell homemade vanilla ice cream. All of Blue Bell's flavors are great!
Softness of the ice cream partially depends on how much air got mixed into it when during the freezing process when it was made. Brands like Ben & Jerry's typically have less hair. Basically they spin the liquid ice cream mix well they are freezing it to incorporate some air. If they did not do this you would have something like a popsicle. Good trick to scoop out hard ice cream is the dip the scoop in some hot water shake the excess water off and then put the scoop in.
This makes me want to try gelato.
Yeah I've never had it before. I'm a Blue Bell Ice Cream kind of gal. 🍨
Dew it
Talenti is gelato, and there are plenty of gelato places around the US. But be warned: it's like 4x the price of regular American ice cream!
You’ve never had gelato before?
@@frusit861 Nope, I didn't even it's a thing until I watch this video