Although chef Colin Fassnidge tried to argue that the Irish have the best ice cream recipes, Italian brothers Josh and Nic Sama made their case for gelato as they took out the People’s Choice challenge in Sunday night’s episode of My Kitchen Rules. “I gotta say that ice cream’s bloody good,” enthused judge Pete Evans as he tucked into the “Nutty Italian Sundae” with chocolate and hazelnut gelato, chocolate fudge, a hazelnut and almond crunch, raspberry coulis and orange whipped cream.
Now fans of the show can sample the main element of the winning dish when Josh and Nic’s chocolate and hazelnut ice cream (er, gelato) appears in tubs at Cole’s starting today. “Oh, there are going to be so many ladies waiting for us, far out,” says Nic with a joyful laugh. Adds Josh, “You know what, though? Forget about that. You know how many kids come up to us? I think the kids are the ones who are going to come out and go, ‘Ma, I don’t want ice cream, I want gelato!'”
Outside of the grand final winners’ $250,000 bounty, this reward for the best ice cream is the next biggest prize on MKR. “This was pretty much the only challenge that I wanted to win,” says Nic, who decided with his brother to keep their concept very Italian and something he may want to recreate in a gelato shop he plans to open. “Hence why we did the hazelnut,” Nic says, “because it’s a play on Nutella and obviously Nutella is from Italy, so we wanted to do that, so winning the ice cream challenge, or as we call it, the gelato challenge, you know is awesome.”
Explaining further, Josh says the chocolate and hazelnut combination harkens back to the Northern Italian region where his mother was born, but the croccantino (“like a praliine chocolate”) with a hint of added chilli “is a southern thing, which is where we’re from, just to add that spice. It’s a little different and we wanted to play on that. It was subtle but even the kids loved that.”
Adds Josh of winning the challenge, “Oh, that’s the best thing. Having our faces on the gelato and going shopping and having my wife looking at it and going, ‘Oh, now we see you here, too,’ and then having my son actually see that and experience that? I love to make them proud.”
For more on ‘MKR’, pick up the latest issue of WHO on newsstands today.
‘My Kitchen Rules’ airs Monday through Wednesday at 7.30 PM on Seven.