Barista Magazine has had some happy encounters with gelato recently ”Publisher Kenneth Olson attended SIGEP in Rimini, Italy, in January of this year to report on the coffee portion of the show. But as SIGEP is a giant gelato conference first and foremost, he had the pleasure of living off of ice cream for three days. We also featured a story here on our blog recently about the delicious trend of specialty-coffee roasters teaming up with ice cream purveyors to create spectacular coffee ice creams and gelatos.
So we were stoked for our friends at Single Origin Roasters in Sydney, Australia, when the coffee ice cream collaboration they did with gelateria Cow and The Moon, won the World Gelato Championship title at the Italian competition this month! How awesome is that?
The winning gelato was a coffee-infused Mandorla Affogato that feature Single Origin’s Kigwandi AB Kenya in espresso form, mixed with salted caramel sauce which is then folder into Madagascan vanilla gelato. Kigwandi AB Kenya is also used to create the toffee praline that is folded throughout the gelato.
Single Origin’s coffee buyer, Wendy De Jong, and head roaster, Edward Strachan, decided on this coffee for the gelato project because they wanted a coffee that would hold its own and burst through the many other rich flavors. “Bright, bold, and complex was key,” Wendy said.
In fact, Wendy and Edward, along with Cow and The Moon quality controllers cupped and voted on three Kenyan lots to choose the best one for the job. The Kigwandi AB Kenya from Dormans took first place, followed by Kigwandi AA and Mirigi PB.
But they weren’t finished.
The three coffees were roasted for espresso evaluation and tasted when paired with the salted caramel sauce. Again, Kigwandi AB Kenya was the winner.
In Rimini for the championship, the team worked with a local cafe that was kind enough to let them use their La Marzocco Linea and Mahlkönig grinder to pull 11 liters of fresh coffee, a process that took about 5 hours. Obviously, when they took first place the next day in the final round, the work had been worth it.
Back home in Sydney, Single Origin Roasters is busy roasting batches of the coffee for more of the championship-winning gelato. For more information, visit www.singlesoriginroasters.com.
