What is "gelato"

by 1970, from Italian gelato, literally "frozen," past participle of gelare "to freeze" (see cold (adj.)).

n. An Italian variant of ice cream made from milk and sugar, combined with other flavourings. The ingredients are super-cooled while stirring to break up ice crystals as they form.

Gelato (; plural: gelati ) is the Italian word for ice cream, commonly used, in English, for ice cream made in an Italian style. Gelato is made with a base of milk, cream, and sugar, and flavored with fruit and nut purees and other flavorings. It is generally lower in fat, but higher in sugar, than other styles of ice cream. Gelato typically contains less air and more flavoring than other kinds of frozen desserts, giving it a density and richness that distinguishes it from other ice creams.

The sugar in gelato is balanced with the water to act as an anti-freeze to prevent it from freezing solid. Types of sugar used include sucrose, dextrose, and inverted sugar to control apparent sweetness. Typically, gelato contains a stabilizer base. Commercial bases usually contain guar gum.

In Italy, by law, gelato must have at least 3.5% butterfat. In the United States, there is no legal standard of definition for gelato, as there is for ice cream, which must contain at least 10% butterfat.

Gelato (from Italian language: "Frozen", or "Icecream") is a hardware-accelerated, offline renderer created by graphics card manufacturer Nvidia. It was originally intended for use with its Quadro FX GPU, although a Quadro class GPU is no longer a requirement, as it now also supports GeForce cards. Designed to produce film-quality images, Gelato uses a shading language very similar to RenderMan's. Gelato was first released in April 2004. NVIDIA stated in May 2008 that it will no longer be developing or supporting the Gelato software products .

With the release of Gelato 2.0, and in a push to popularize GPU accelerated rendering (as opposed to the traditional CPU rendering), Nvidia released a free version of Gelato for PCs. Some of the more advanced features on this version were locked out, such as those used for production rendering. This was done to encourage more professional users to purchase the full product. However, on 23 May 2008, Nvidia released Gelato Pro as a free download without any additional license. It does not come with support from Nvidia, but there are user forums.

Gelato is Italian ice cream.

Gelato may also refer to:

• Gelato (software), a graphics rendering program
• Gelato Federation, a former coalition of institutions supporting Linux on the Itanium architecture