It all comes down to three factors: fat, air, and serving temperature.
After"what's your favorite ice cream?", the question I get asked the most as an ice cream maker is"what makes gelato different from ice cream?" How does gelato get that soft, elastic texture and slow-to-melt milkiness compared to ice cream's richer, creamier body?. The more complicated answer? Things aren't always clear cut: this is food, not phylogeny, so individual recipes can blur the lines between the two. But there are some basic differences to keep in mind.
There are some other tricks to keep ice cream soft, such as alcohol, starch, protein , and natural stabilizers like guar gum and carageenan, but the top four above are the big factors at play.Coffee ice cream at Ample Hills Creamery, NYC. Rich and creamy, but with noticeable fluff and body compared to gelato.churned into it during the freezing process. American ice creams are heavy on the cream, and have a fat content, by American labeling law, of at least 10% .
American-style ice creams are churned fast and hard to whip in plenty of air , which is aided by the high proportion of cream in the base. The most high-end ice creams have an overrun of 25% or so, which means they've increased in volume by 25%; cheaper commercial versions can run from 50% to over 90%, which gives them a light, thin, fast-melting texture that isn't very flavorful ., which introduces less air into the base—think whipping cream by hand instead of with a stand mixer.
If you make ice cream at home, you may be wondering about your ice cream machine: does it churn at ice cream speed or gelato speed? The truth is, most of the consumer models on the market churn at about the same speed, none of which are as fast as the commercial machines used to make American-style ice cream. But you can make both ice cream and gelato in your machine—remember, air is only one of the differences between them.