A walk around the ice cream parlors in the West Zone of São Paulo is enough to notice something relatively new in the cold vats. Strawberry ice cream, for example, is no longer bubblegum pink, and pistachio ice cream is no longer that fluorescent green hue it once had.
Behind this change is a new generation of ice cream makers who, in the last ten years, have established themselves in São Paulo’s most gastronomic neighborhoods and ended up changing the face and flavor of our summers.
Among them, there are from newcomers to the profession to renowned chefs – as is the case of the Catalan Oscar Bosch, partner of the Tanit restaurant and the Nit Bar de Tapas, which opens the Mooi Mooi ice cream shop in Itaim Bibi this Wednesday (9).
This class prefers to start their recipes from scratch and shun industrialized stabilizers, emulsifiers and flavorings. Ingredients are fresh, preferably local and in season, whenever possible purchased from small producers.
One of the pioneers, Marcia Garbin, from Gelato Boutique, started selling her ice cream in 2012, in carts that traveled to gastronomic fairs and parties. She remembers how different the scene was back then.
“Even those who made ice cream were more or less successful, because customers barely knew about artisanal ice creams”, says Garbin, who now runs two stores, in Jardim Paulista and in Pinheiros.
Fernanda Bastos and Thomas Zande, from Frida & Mina, came soon after. They opened the first ice cream shop in Pinheiros, in 2013, with the proposal to only use ingredients that are also on supermarket lists – zero industrialized bases.
Today with two units, both in Pinheiros, the couple sells strawberry ice cream with balsamic vinegar and orange ice cream with cashew nut praline – in the artisanal cookie cone, a ball costs R$14. On a single hot Sunday , they come out up to 1,200 units in the matrix alone.
More and more greedy montages are the ball of the day. At Gelato Boutique, Garbin prepares old desserts that had been missing, such as ice cream bowls with sweets and syrups (R$29 each) and baked alaska (R$29): on a sponge cake base, the ice cream it is covered in Italian meringue and toasted in a blowtorch.
At Mooi Mooi, Bosch grinds ingredients together with the ice cream. You can choose a house recipe, such as king kong, which has crushed banana ice cream with pecan nut sablé (crunchy dough), cubes of dehydrated banana and meringue (R$ 21), or make the mixture to taste.
At Sorveteria do Centro, which the couple Jefferson and Janaína Rueda opened in 2018, the ice creams are of the soft type, the ultra-creamy type of fast food, but in 100% artisanal production.
The cones produced in the house gain different colors by the addition of spinach, cocoa, beetroot or coal. Larger than the conventional size, they accommodate other ingredients – in the geladão (R$ 25), the milk ice cream almost disappears under layers of iced cake, coconut mousse, crispy coconut, pennyroyal, pineapple syrup and white chocolate with coconut.
“When I was a child, I loved to eat ice cream filled with confectionery in Alaska. That was our inspiration”, says Janaína.
The nostalgia for childhood ice cream also guided the couple Larissa Schutze and João Naufal, who opened the Pinguina ice cream shop in 2019.
“I didn’t want to launch another creamy Italian gelato. I preferred to sell an authentic Brazilian ice cream, which formed balls”, explains Schutze.
In a restored 1968 machine, the duo blends ice cream from mangoes harvested on the family farm and coffee from the Tocaya roaster, among other flavors. Fruits such as cupuaçu, soursop, seriguela, guava, jabuticaba and cajá appear when they are in season (R$ 12 a ball).
In the last week of January, milkshakes were launched (R$ 28) – the milk pudding is shaken with the sweet from Pudim do Olim. It is also possible to combine the ice creams with brownies or cookies baked there. For babies and dogs, it has pure fruit popsicle, blended without trace of sugar.
At the Pine Co. ice cream shop, which has been operating in Pinheiros since 2018, the descendant of Koreans Raphael Lee is responsible for creating the flavors. He defines himself as a chameleon – he changes according to the ingredients and ideas that emerge.
The novelty is the yuzu ice cream, a citrus fruit originally from Asia (R$ 14 a scoop). But Lee has even turned cigar infusion into ice cream.
“It’s a lot of fun to play with flavors. At first, I’d cross the street, go into the hortifruti and make ice cream with what I found that day. Only the cigar didn’t catch on. People like novelty, but not that much”, he thinks it’s funny. .
The search for natural ingredients goes beyond the ice cream itself and reaches the packaging. At Albero dei Gelati, a branch of a family-owned ice cream shop founded in Italy, the cups are made from manioc starch (R$14 for a small one). In contact with water or soil, they decompose in a maximum of 30 days – and are even edible.
Former employee of the matrix, Fernanda Pamplona received carte blanche from the Italian partners to adapt the ice cream to the taste of São Paulo. The ricotta with marmalade, for example, became ricotta with dulce de leche.
Pamplona mines her ingredients among artisanal producers to arrive at the concept she calls “agricultural ice cream” – one of the flavors mixes cheese from Capim Canastra, honey from Heborá and cashew nuts from Matury Cajucultura.
Fresh milk and cream, the two main raw materials of the ice cream shop, are delivered weekly by the Terra Limpida organic project, conducted by Italian rural producers in the municipality of Cassia dos Coqueiros (SP).
Even very Italian flavors were Brazilianized. Stracciatella ice cream, the creamy filling of the burrata, appears under a generous layer of guava paste. “I fill the window with color, to debunk the myth that healthy ice cream has no flavor,” says Pamplona.
Making ice cream from scratch is a lot more work. In the industry, the offer of cheap products is plentiful, such as the stabilizer, which prevents the formation of ice crystals, and the emulsifier, which guarantees creaminess.
According to Francisco Santana, owner of Escola Sorvete, free recipes for such products require more technical knowledge from the ice cream maker. “They say it is not possible to make ice cream without them, which is not true. But it is necessary to know how to balance the ingredients very well”, he says.
The option to produce 100% natural ice cream helps to conquer a growing team of consumers: vegans. In theory, all water-based recipes, with fruit and sugar, cater to this audience. On the other hand, it is more difficult to please the fit group or diabetics, since sugar is a key ingredient for obtaining texture.
“What I do is produce ice cream with little sugar, between 18% to 20%. But if I want to eliminate it completely, I will have to use sweeteners, which I prefer not to do”, explains Pamplona.
The solution, in this case, would be to produce popsicle – a segment that São Paulo’s ice cream parlors still barely explore. Not even Francisco Santana, a great enthusiast of the idea, put artisanal popsicles for sale in the delivery of his factory-school, currently focused on creamy ice creams in pots (R$ 39.90, with 400 grams) and ice cream pies (from R$ $89.90 to R$99.90), another retro-recovered fashion.
According to him, competition from popsicles produced in the backyard, for very low prices, and the “trauma of the Mexican palette”, which made many entrepreneurs go broke, have prevented this segment from taking off. Who knows for next summer?
I am currently a news writer for News Bulletin247 where I mostly cover sports news. I have always been interested in writing and it is something I am very passionate about. In my spare time, I enjoy reading and spending time with my family and friends.
