The Flavours of Pinocchio

Story by Debby Waldman

  Without a lie, Salvatore and Tom Ursino make some of the best ice cream you’ll ever taste 

  It’s a Wednesday morning and Salvatore Ursino, an elfin man with bright grey eyes, is standing beside a long freezer. His silver-coloured hair is tucked under a cap – the kind of headgear you might see on a man flipping burgers at a diner. Armed with two ice cream scoops, Sal is shaping amaretto ice cream balls and rolling them in almond bits. At an age where most men have long since retired, the 75-year-old still shows up for work every day at Pinocchio Ice Cream, the business he’s been running for 24 years.

  “People ask what’s my secret,” he says. “My hands, my head and my heart. If you don’t have that, then forget it.” His customers would say he’s left out a key element: his palate, and that of his 36-year-old son and partner, Tom.

  “You tell them a flavour and they give it to you and it’s perfect,” says Brad Lazarenko, owner and chef at Culina, an Edmonton restaurant. Pinocchio has developed a number of specialty flavours for Culina, including chocolate-cream-cheese-red-wine gelato and white-wine-orange-and-cream-cheese gelato. Lazarenko describes both varieties as “pretty awesome.”

  As for Salvatore and Tom, Lazarenko says they’re awesome, too. “I’ve never had to fix what they’ve made, or ask them to do more of this or that. They’re very good at flavouring.”

  Tom credits the company’s success to experience, ingredients and luck. As befits a company whose roots are overseas – in Italy, where Sal lived until moving to Canada in 1951 – the ingredients have an international flavour. While the milk, cream, sugar and herbs are all bought locally, the Ursinos use three-strength vanilla from Madagascar, 22% to 24% butterfat cocoa from Holland, pure chocolate liquor from Belgium and pistachio paste from Italy. The mango purée for sorbet comes from India.

  “The better the quality, the less chance you have of having a lousy product,” Tom says. “People always come in trying to sell me ingredients but as soon as I see artificial colour or flavour, I won’t touch it.”

  Tom gets ideas for flavours from reading industry magazines and asking local chefs what they’re serving. Salvatore, a former chair-maker who went back to Italy in the early 1980s to learn to make ice cream, develops the formulas.

  About 130 Edmonton restaurants – among them Packrat Louie, Characters, the Fairmont Hotel Macdonald, La Ronde, Mikado, the Lemongrass Café and the High Level Diner – serve Pinocchio’s ice creams, gelatos, sorbets and ice cream balls. The minimum run for specialty sorbets and gelatos is 12 litres, so restaurants are often more willing to try unusual flavours in those rather than in ice creams, which require a minimum run of 300 litres.

  Salvatore says he’ll make just about any flavour as long as he has the right ingredients. He’s made sorbets with vegetables, champagne, herbs, fresh fruit and even Guinness beer, a process that required pouring the beer the day before to settle the foam on top.

  It was a good flavour, Tom says. Usually that’s the case but there have been missteps. Chamomile ice cream, commissioned by a restaurant, wasn’t very popular. Neither was blueberry. The curry sorbet the company was asked to develop for a banquet a number of years ago earns a grimace from Salvatore, who calls it “the weirdest sorbet I ever made.” Tom is a bit more diplomatic. “It was cold,” he recalls. “Then it got hot.”

  The company has been making specialty flavours for restaurants since 1982, when Salvatore and his brother-in-law opened a store in west Edmonton. They chose the name “Pinocchio” because it was Italian, familiar and conjured up an image they felt would appeal to a variety of people. “What could be better?” Salvatore says. “Old people, children – everyone remembers their childhood.”

  His instincts were clearly on target. In addition to selling in bulk to restaurants, Pinocchio did a brisk business selling ice cream to walk-in customers. After about four years, the brother-in-law fled for warmer temperatures in Arizona and Salvatore and his wife ran the company until she retired about eight years ago.

Tom joined full-time after high school and eventually the family closed the walk-in shop. Now they operate out of a 5,000 square foot space in an industrial area in northwest Edmonton, supplying restaurants and a handful of Edmonton retail stores including the Italian Centre Shop, the Big Fresh, Sunterra Market, Pic ‘n’ Del, Lansdowne IGA, and D’Amore Italian Deli.

Pinocchio Ice Cream is the very definition of a family-owned business. The two Ursinos are the sole employees and they do everything from washing down the walls to making deliveries. It’s a good thing that Salvatore shows no sign of slowing down, because the business doesn’t either.

The current obsession with eating healthy and cutting back on fats hasn’t hurt Pinocchio. In fact, sales are up 15% over last year. Sorbet, which has no butterfat, now accounts for 35% of the company’s sales, up from 8% a decade ago and almost nothing when the company first started.

The Ursinos are happy with the growth, but they have no desire to get so big that they can no longer control the quality of their products. “I do want to grow, but in baby steps, so the quality is still there,” Tom says. “It’s not that I have to be in everybody’s freezer, but I want everybody to try it, so they can taste the difference.”

The Skinny on Gelato

  In Italy, gelato is an all-purpose name for ice cream – it means anything frozen, the Ursinos explain. That’s not the case in Canada, where gelato is a frozen dessert that has 5% to 6% butterfat. Sherbet has 3% butterfat, while sorbet, which is made with water and no cream, has no butterfat. Light ice cream generally has 8% to 9% butterfat, and ice cream is anything with more than 10% butterfat.