BACON ice cream? I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read through the week’s menu at The Mantle’s Stampede Gelato stall.
“With macadamia nuts and toffee,” owner Adam Semple adds.
This isn’t the only sensory bender you can sample with Semple: he’ll also do your head in—and delight your palate—with rosemary with olive oil, avocado with chocolate corn chips and durian ice cream. Neopolitan is like, so yesterday.
Having returned from living in Italy as a professional cyclist—as you do—Semple decided Australia had no good gelato.
So he decided to start making his own, with a second-hand machine bought on Gumtree, and started flogging it to friends.
Two months later, he’s selling his ice cream to IGAs around town and looking for a warehouse site so he can start making it industrial-scale.
Success, he says, relies on the fact Stampede Gelato is doing what no-one ever dared to do: to “think outside the box” to “create as extremely weird ice cream as possible”.
Trying something that “can’t be good” to discover it’s “actually delicious” is what stimulates people and makes his gelato different.
I’ll admit to trepidation as I dig into a bowl of bacon, macadamia nuts and toffee ice cream.
Doubts disappear as it all comes together in the mouth: the soft, melting, sweet velvet of the ice-cream, the sticky pudding and the salty goodness of the bacon. The ice cream is soft but consistent, different to any other gelato I’ve tried.
After finishing my first bowl, I rush into the next one: rosemary with olive oil. This one is softer, more delicate. The spiciness of the rosemary pops up among the softness of the oil. It’s another unexpected mash-up that leaves me wanting more.
Alex Semple messes with your mind with different flavour mixes weekly at The Mantle, scooping from 6 to 10pm Thursday to Saturday. It’s fefinitely worth leaving prejudgments at home and risking a mango cayenne coriander or a pepper custard scoop.
by MARTA PASCUAL JUANOLA
Stampede Gelato
(at The Mantle)
1 James St, Fremantle
Thursday to Saturday 6-10pm
