It’s not something most of us would order off of a menu or even try but water buffalo milk gelato is the number one seller at Uno Gelato in Vancouver.
“May I offer you the Uno Gelato buffalo milk Sicillian lemon?” said creator James Coleridge offering it to a customer.
The reactions from those who tried it for the first time summed it up.
“Wow,” said one customer.
One customer said it’s not something he would consider until he tried it.
"But tasting it, absolutely. Yeah," he said.
The gelato’s main ingredient comes from Tesfa Farms in the Fraser Valley which has been milking water buffalo for about three years.
"We've had the milk, we've had our yogurt but we've never had gelato," said Christy Bennik.
"Well it was something we wanted to do but we just hadn't networked enough to find the right person that was able to do it," added her husband Brad.
Coleridge is a master gelato maker who established the popular Bella Gelateria in downtown Vancouver before selling it in 2017.
He came up with the recipe for water buffalo milk gelato, using brown rice syrup powder for consistency, birch syrup from Sweet Tree Venture Farms in Quesnel, and Sicilian lemon oil from Italy.
“The acid of the lemon cuts through the creaminess of the buffalo milk," Coleridge said.
Buffalo milk has a high fat content which makes it very rich and creamy. It also has 58 per cent more calcium than dairy cows' milk, 40 per cent more protein and 43 per cent less cholesterol.
A scoop of the buffalo milk lemon gelato will cost about $6.75. A take home half kilo is about $20.
Coleridge expects it will be a big hit for the holidays.
