Stracciatella gelato

Stracciatella may look like one of the simplest gelato flavours, but much of the final result depends on how the chocolate is handled. The dairy base is deliberately clean and creamy, allowing the darker and more aromatic notes of the chocolate to stand out.

There are different ways to incorporate it. Chocolate pieces create a firmer, crunchier contrast, while melted chocolate poured slowly onto the cold gelato near the end of churning sets almost immediately and breaks into the thin, irregular shards associated with classic stracciatella.

The temperature of the chocolate, the speed at which it is poured and the movement of the gelato all influence the size of those shards. This detail is what separates a fine, evenly distributed stracciatella from a dairy gelato containing ordinary chocolate chunks. The recipe is therefore built around the contrast between a soft, relatively neutral base and the clean snap and bitterness of dark chocolate.