Cambridge Edition November 2019

FOOD & DR INK

JACK’S SCOOPS

Regular visitors to Jack’s Gelato will have spotted that his plastic spoons are a thing of the past: replaced with smooth bamboo sticks for tastes and cup-based ices. “That’s taken years,” he says. “I hate those normal wooden spoons, made out of birch – they’ve got a texture on the tongue, they taste of wood – they’re just horrible. So that wasn’t an option. Bioplastic wasn’t an option either: we looked into it and it needs to be processed properly, it’s not compostable like a lemon peel is – and Cambridge doesn’t have those facilities yet. So we got these bamboo ones, which are smooth and tasteless – but we had to get them custommade, and buy half a million of them, which is about 20 years’ worth. It took a while, but we did it, and now they’re all in my attic,” he laughs. “The amount of time, effort and investment in one tiny little aspect of the business – we don’t bang the drum about it, but we do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

“It’s the variety and intensity of flavours that keep Jack’s gelato at the forefront of Cambridge’s mind”

example: Scandis or people who’ve spent a lot of time there love salted licorice, but it’s not for everyone. It’s the same with the alcoholic flavours: some people find them too much, some people go nuts for them. There’s a family who live about 30 miles away – whenever they see a new [alcohol- based] flavour come up, they drive down and get double scoops of each.” Next year will mark ten years of Jack scooping on the streets of Cambridge, and 20 years of working in food. He grew up in Cambridge, starting working life as a cycle courier – the pre-internet, non- digital equivalent of an email. “I loved it,” he says. “I was 16, it was the summer between my GCSEs and my A-levels, and I was really into cycling – and we were

Bramley apple ripple. When I stop back a week later to take photos, there’s a vegan poached pear and ginger, five-day cultured yoghurt, roasted Macadamia nut, and chocolate fudge ripple. This ever-changing list gives Jack and his team flexibility to experiment with wild combinations of flavours, but there’s never been a type that’s “tanked”, as Jack explains – it just depends on what individuals like or don’t like. “The only time it’s ever rattled me was at a wedding, where I’d left the stand to fetch something and heard a guest say that the salted licorice was disgusting. I stopped, backtracked and said: ‘Care to elaborate on that?’ and he said: ‘It’s just so… licorice-y’. That’s actually the perfect

shop, a wedding, a festival, something else somewhere else – and each event often has their own flavour… coordinating all of that can be a bit overwhelming - but we have a fantastic team of people to help,” he says. “There can be weekends where we have 35 different flavours coming out of the unit.” It’s the variety and intensity of flavours that keep Jack’s Gelato at the forefront of Cambridge’s mind: the list genuinely does change every day, with no single variety as a constant (“the tourists ask for the most popular flavour, and you have to say ‘ah, but the flavours change every day’”). You might encounter Lebanese sesame – a creation dreamed up on his most recent trip to the Middle East – or mille-feuille; or cinnamon and

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C A M B S E D I T I O N . C O . U K

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