Ice Cream University: following sweet dreams in sour financial times

Enrolment at Gelato University has nearly doubled in the last year as laid-off workers look to reinvent themselves.

ROME // For most people it is an affordable luxury, a guilty treat savoured between meals. But for a growing number of entrepreneurs, Italian ice cream offers a chance to reinvent themselves and forge a new future in recessionary times. Enrolments at an Italian "university" which teaches the fine art of making gelato have almost doubled in the past year, as high-flying executives who have lost their jobs in the global economic crisis hope to satisfy the world's sweet tooth.

Students arrive with a common dream: to learn how to make the ice cream in the institute's hi-tech laboratories and then use their new-found expertise to open gelateria back home. Last year, more than 6,000 people from all over the world paid to attend the ?700 (Dh3,600) a week course at Gelato University in Bologna, a city in northern Italy which is so renowned for its food that its nickname is "La Grassa" - The Fat One.

There is particularly keen interest from the Middle East and North Africa, with participants in the past few weeks coming from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Sudan. "We had a group of 10 from Syria recently, and a businessman who is going to open 90 gelateria shops in North Africa and the Middle East," said Patrick Hopkins, the American director of the university, which was established in 2003. "People in the Middle East are already familiar with the sort of soft ice cream that squirts out of the pump at McDonald's. Now they're ready for something else."

The university is an offshoot of Carpigiani, an Italian company that manufactures about 70 per cent of the world's gelato-making machines. "Gelato is becoming more and more popular in the Middle East because it is perceived as an emblem of the European lifestyle," said Federico Tassi, who is in charge of sales in the region. "It is also a lot healthier. American-style ice creams have a fat content of 12 to16 per cent whereas gelato's fat content is four to eight per cent."

Sales of Carpigiani's gelato-making machines have nearly doubled in five years in the "strongholds" of Dubai, Iran, Syria and Lebanon, he said. The university runs six courses, from beginner to advanced, in which students are taught how to balance two key elements - the fat found in milk and cream, which acts as an antifreeze, and the sugar in fruit and chocolate, which does the opposite. The size of the ice crystals in gelato is also crucial - the tinier the crystals, the smoother the gelato.

"We've had an 89 per cent increase in enrolments. We're getting more and more people who have been hit by the economic crisis and want to create a new future for themselves," said Mr Hopkins. "A lot of them are senior businesspeople who have lost their jobs. Outside Italy it's not as though there's a gelateria on every corner. People taste Italian gelato and think to themselves, 'Why don't we have this at home?' They attend the course and come up with a business plan."

One of the students on the course this week was Seb Cole, 30, from London, who until recently worked in printing but hopes to open his own gelateria in Brighton, on the south coast of England, this summer. "I wanted my own business and I'd been looking for an opportunity for the last five years," he said. "Gelato is lower in fat than the ice cream you get in the UK and it's more faithful to the flavour."

As well as learning how to concoct familiar flavours such as chocolate, strawberry and vanilla, students experiment with more outlandish tastes, including gelato made from red wine, olive oil, beer, Parmesan cheese and basil. "In China for some reason they are particularly keen on fish-flavoured gelato," said Mr Hopkins. "Gelato is a platform for flavours - you can adapt it to whatever culture you're in. Pear with Parmesan and lemon with basil are some of the more unusual ones our students have come up with."

* The National