The reasons that pushed me to write this book
I have to tell you a couple of very personal things. I've been waiting two years and I can finally do it!
The idea of writing a book like this has been bubbling around in my head for a while, perhaps since I started writing handouts for ice cream making courses in the early 2000s.
Being new to the industry, I started in '98, taking inspiration from the texts I saw around me from which I hoped to gain much more information.
I was particularly struck by the abundance of photographs in some of the texts. I would have liked to have a much more technical text in my hands, written in technical language:
- without even a photograph of ice cream, but only diagrams and tables;
- that he talked about the structure of ice cream;
- what happens when a sugar dissolves in the pasteurizer;
- how a refrigeration system works;
- what the air flows are in a display case and so on.
A text made to be studied, underlined, consumed and mistreated.
Utopia? For those years, yes, because all the ice cream makers were on the hunt for recipes, and to sell a book, it was essential to include as many recipes as possible, accompanied by photos to make them easier to read. While I fully understood the reasons behind that editorial choice, those books, from my very personal point of view, had a couple of flaws:
- too heavy to hold;
- too beautiful to be underlined,
- too refined to be in the laboratory.
My book philosophy
If what's written stays on the page and doesn't become part of the reader's knowledge, it's completely useless (a bit like buying a beautiful pair of shoes and leaving them in the box for fear of ruining them). I began to dream of writing a technical book, in black and white with some illustrations.
Who would ever publish such a book?
Certainly no publisher in the industry; I had to do it myself. So I started thinking about the graphics, the drawings, the diagrams, the typeface, its size, and a thousand other things until my head was spinning.
My head was spinning in circles, searching for some firm point to hold on to, then I asked myself:
- Which books did you study best?
- What mix of drawings and explanations were there?
- How were they laid out?
That genius Einstein was right when he said that the important thing is the questions, because then the answers come by themselves.
I went to find the texts I had appreciated the most, took them as inspiration and, freehand, began to draw the layout of the page.
At that point I began to see it before me as an idea taking on the contours of a project with increasingly clear lines.
Little by little the chapters and sections fell into place as I accumulated an ever-increasing number of college textbooks and scientific articles.
NLP would say that I am the prototype of the visual, of the one who has to see things, otherwise he doesn't understand them and while I was looking for the right images to describe the structure of the ice cream I typed:
“…let's imagine we are a tiny droplet of water and we can observe the ice cream from inside….”
-“This point of view is a bit surreal,” I thought as I reread the proofs – “but why not, after all, when I do it in courses nobody complains…”.
In a rush, I began to describe everything that that drop of molecular-sized water would see, and a full page came out.
I went to sleep with that image both fantastic and hilarious. I showed that page to a friend of mine, who was completely ice cream-free, in the sense that she hadn't eaten ice cream in years!
“I like it,” he told me. “How does it end?”
"What do you mean, how does it end? It's not a novel, but a technical description that doesn't end anywhere," I clarified.
-Yes, but the way you wrote it, it seems like a journey. Can't it continue?
At that moment the droplet of water became a micro submarine and I began to imagine a fantastic journey through pasteurization, maturation and the moment the ice cream is put on sale.
And aboard this submarine we will take a fantastic journey inside the ice cream facility.
The big picture was complete, all that remained was to find someone willing to lay it out, design the submarine, and help me write the text.
The team that created this book was composed as follows:
To the coordination and revision of the texts for his in-depth knowledge of the sector, but above all because I blindly trust his opinion.
To illustrations, because it manages to transform the information contained in a text into drawings and I like its aesthetic sense;
Entered mid-game, fundamental in completing the layout of the two volumes in an impeccable manner;
They never thought they'd print a book about ice cream. Their expressions, when they discovered it consisted of two volumes, seemed to say: "All these pages to explain how ice cream is made?"
We've formed a group to quickly exchange information and comments and poured all our passion into these pages.
I can never be grateful enough to them for helping make this dream come true.
Now, after more than two years of work, everything is ready and I'm very happy to be able to present it.
Gelatology awaits you!
Are you curious to know what happens on board the micro-submarine?
Click here and read the first of seven episodes.
