By Leslie Brenner

Given the unwanted Covid-19 pounds I’m still carrying around (dieting soon, promise!), I have no business making ice cream like it’s going out of style. But recently when I made a batch of fresh Bing Cherry Ice Cream and put it in my ice cream maker, the ancient yet trusty machine chose that moment to die.

I bought a new ice cream maker — a bigger, better version of my beloved Cuisinart machine that had been with me for something like 15 years. (I’ll write about that soon.)

The maker worked perfectly for the cherry ice cream, but then I suddenly had to know whether it also made perfect gelato, as it has a dedicated gelato setting. Although gelato is simply the Italian word for “ice cream,” as David Lebovitz points out in my favorite ice cream book, The Perfect Scoop, it is “usually less sweet than traditional ice cream, and it is very thick and somewhat sticky.” He goes on to explain that its “distinctively dense texture” is the result of very little air being whipped into it.

Lebovitz’s recipe for Gianduja Gelato jumped out at me, as I love classic gelato flavors, and you can’t get much more classic than giandiuja. Pronounced jahn-doo-yah, the Piedmontese hazelnut-chocolate confection (which is sometimes spelled gianduia) is the sweet that inspired Nutella — but it’s a hundred times better, with much purer flavors.

Although traditionally gianduja is made with dark chocolate (along with ground hazelnuts), Lebovitz’s recipe calls for milk chocolate. It sounded wonderful, but I wondered whether the four ounces of milk chocolate would make the gelato as chocolately I hoped it would be.

Then I noticed that the photo in the book showed Gianduja Gelato with an upgrade: stracciatella, or chocolate chips. Made by pouring melted dark chocolate into the gelato just as it’s finishing its churning routine, stracciatella may be one of the most important inventions every to come out of Italy — easily as significant as the radio, the Julian calendar, or confetti. “The flow of chocolate immediately hardens into streaks, which get shredded (stracciato) into ‘chips’ as the ice cream as stirred,” Lebovitz explains.

Yes! I had to have stracciatelli in my hazelnut gelato. And man, oh, man, is it awesome.

I’ve been parsimoniously rationing the gelato, allowing my husband Thierry as much as he’d like, but myself just very small scoop every couple of days. Not much help for my waistline, of course, but it is definitely making our heat wave here in Dallas a wee bit more delightful. In fact, it’s one of the best desserts to come out of my kitchen in a long while.

RECIPE: Gianduja-Straciatella Gelato