Learning to make gelato

We all fell deeply in love with gelato while in Italy. It's just got so much more flavor than regular ice cream and we wanted to figure out why. We did some research and found out that gelato has less sugar and more fruit or whatever flavor you put in there - hense, more flavor. We also found out that while ice cream has twice as much cream as milk, gelato has twice as much milk as cream. And gelato has egg yolks in it.

So one of our shared summer goals was to learn how to make gelato. And we've done a pretty good job figuring it out! So far we've made banana gelato and Nutella gelato (super good to have a little of these two flavors in the same serving!).

Best recipe we found:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/chocolate-hazelnut-gelato-recipe.html

Video showing how to make it:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/videos/chocolate-hazelnut-gelato-0170364.html

To make the banana kind, we followed the same recipe for the chocolate hazelnut gelato but mashed up two very ripe bananas and put that in instead of the Nutella.

We learned that it's very important to put the "custard" in the fridge for a couple hours before putting it into the ice cream maker. We poured the custard in hot when we did our first batch and it barely made it to milk-shake consistency - but it did set up OK when we put it in the freezer. When we cooled the custard on the second batch, it froze nicely in the ice cream maker.