Locally made goats-milk gelato a hit
Averill Turnbull at the recent World on a Plate event. Photo: Neil Wilson.
Averill Turnbull’s goats-milk gelato was one of the undoubted hits of the recent “World on a Plate” fundraiser at Golden Bay High School.
She offered five different flavours of the gourmet lower-fat alternative to ice cream, and the queues at her stall said it all: the diners were very impressed with the creamy treat that is served at a warmer temperature than ice cream.
Averill’s own favourite gelato flavour is the fig and Heaphy honey, but the tiramisu, vanilla bean, chocolate, and raspberry flavours were also very popular.
“The raspberry one is boosted with some of Terry Knight’s brandied raspberries. The adults seemed to really like it.”
One diner, who had been back four times to Averill’s stall, summed it up perfectly: “It’s a very grown-up alternative to ice cream.”
Averill learned how to make gelato at a course with Australia’s top gelato maker in Sydney last spring.
“It’s something I’d always wanted to do. I experimented with it in the Totally Local cooking contest last year and I’d been fiddling around with flavours and things at home. The course in Sydney was really good. We worked on 27 flavours in two days, so it was really intense.”
Averill says that the high school’s fundraising food event was the ideal launching pad for her new product. Using the batch freezer she has imported from China, she plans to make a regular supply of gelato to sell in the Bay and beyond in the coming summer.
The gelato will augment her production of cheese.
“I make about two tonnes of cheese each year. I’m primarily a goat-farmer. The milking is the most important thing to me. I’ve been forced into being a food producer really. I bottle about 100 litres of my goats’ milk each week in the season and the gelato is a way of using up some of the high-quality milk my goats produce.”
Averill finds the marketing and selling parts of the business “really hard”.
“It’s not easy to go into a supermarket, restaurant or market and convince people that your product is great.”
Averill says she gets great support from restaurants over the Hill and elsewhere in New Zealand. Their enthusiasm may be fuelled by the inclusion of Averill’s renowned chèvre and Provence cheeses in cheese-master Juliet Harbutt’s book Cheeses of the World.
Neil Wilson
