Vancouver gelato master James Coleridge named Canada’s top maker of Italian ice cream
The winner of the Gelato Festival World Masters’ national competition considers gelato an artform
James Coleridge.
Gelato by James.
VANCOUVER’S JAMES COLERIDGE has just won the title of the top gelato artisan in Canada at the Gelato Festival World Masters Competition’s national challenge.
The event is considered the world’s most prestigious gelato championship, organized by Carpigiani and Sigep—Italian Exhibition Group, held in more than 22 countries. Coleridge will head to the North American semi-finals in Los Angeles this fall, with the final international competition taking place in Italy in 2025.
The founder of Gelato by James won the national challenge, which was held in Toronto, with his salty-sweet “Texas Pecan with an Italian Soul”, beating out 17 other competitors from across the country. His winning recipe featured Texas-pecan paste, mascarpone cheese, dark maple syrup from Quebec, candied pecan pieces, an Italian Amarena cherry sauce, and Vancouver Island sea salt, all infused with a hickory and cherry-apple smoke.
A graduate of Italy's Carpigiani Gelato University, Coleridge used to own Vancouver’s Bella Gelateria, where people would regularly line up around the block to get a taste of his hand-crafted creations. He has won multiple major awards, including Gelato Master of the Year by the International Fair of Artisan Gelato, the Gelato World Tour North America, and Florence Italy Gelato Festival.
Gelato by James’s Nocciola, aka hazelnut.
The way Coleridge sees things, gelato is a veritable artform.
“Gelato is more than a recipe book for others to follow or even the equipment and ingredients themselves,” he says. “It is similar to an artist who holds a paint brush and paint, staring at a blank canvas. It is the artist who transforms his ideas, his vision onto a painting which reflects the artist themselves. In the restaurant world, why does a Michelin Star Chef achieve so much more with similar ingredients and equipment that is available to other Chefs?...While we must learn and honour the past, a gelato maker makes a choice every day to stay comfortably in how they make gelato or challenge themselves to learn and get better.”
Gelato by James’s Crémé Gelato with a Frutti di Bosco swirl.
Coleridge’s latest win proved challenging from the get-go: the ingredients he packed didn’t make it on his flight to Toronto and only arrived nine hours later. That meant he lost his first day of access to the gelato lab. Forced to do prep in his hotel room, he arrived at the competition one day behind with the organizers unable to find a time slot for him to start production.
He went the old-school route and cooked the milk, cream, and dry ingredients on a stove with a thermometer he bought that morning. While the infusion process should have been done overnight, he had rethink and adapt his entire approach and technique.
“It was perhaps the biggest challenge of my gelato career, trying to perfect the flavour with new techniques and untested steps,” Coleridge says in a release. “I was literally jumping around all morning trying to find the best way to make my flavour dance. Sometimes life hands us problems and surprises, but like the values and philosophies I live by and only looking at the positive side, I relied on my years of experience making gelato and my success in competitions around the world to make magic happen.”
His latest winning flavour will be available exclusively at Casereccio Foods in Kitsilano later this month. He will announce the limited release via Instagram.
James Coleridge.
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