Getting Started

Gelato Maestro lets you build a balanced gelato or sorbet recipe, see exactly how it will behave in the batch freezer, scale it to the quantity you need to produce, and keep a permanent record of every run — with cost and margin attached.

First launch

The first time you open Gelato Maestro, a short welcome flow walks you through:

  1. Welcome & license — accept the Terms & Service before continuing.
  2. Mode selection — pick Professional or Enthusiast. You can change this at any time in Settings.
  3. Default library — Gelato Maestro pre-installs a curated set of ingredients (milk, cream, sucrose, dextrose, inverted sugar, SMP, fruit purées, stabilizers, and more) and a few starter recipes you can study or duplicate.
Tip Default ingredients and default recipes are locked so the library stays consistent across updates. To customize one, open it and use Duplicate — your copy is fully editable. If your library ever drifts (after a big import or a recovery), run Settings › Ingredients Integrity › Verify to check and repair it.

The main window

Gelato Maestro uses a two-pane layout on macOS and an adaptive sidebar layout on iPad / iPhone.

Sidebar (left)

Lists your Recipes at the top and your Ingredient Library below — grouped by category (Fats, Sugars, Solids, Water, Stabilizers, Flavorings, Other). Use the search field to filter by name; matching is diacritic- and case-insensitive. See Sidebar & Library for the full reference.

Detail pane (right)

Shows whichever item you've selected. For a recipe, that's the formulation workspace: ingredient list on top, KPI gauges and the freezing curve below. For an ingredient, it's its composition, charts, cost and notes. See Recipe Details and Ingredient Library.

Professional & Enthusiast modes

Gelato Maestro has a single mode toggle in Settings › Mode. Professional shows everything; Enthusiast hides the financial layer (cost, margin, selling price, the Financial tab of Statistics) — useful when you're not selling what you're making.

See Modes for the full list of what changes.

The end-to-end flow

A typical session in Gelato Maestro looks like this:

  1. Create a recipe from the sidebar + button — give it a name and pick a kind (Cream or Sorbet).
  2. Add ingredients and adjust their loads (grams per 1000 g of mix) using the sliders.
  3. Read the gauges — Total Solids, Sugars, Fats, PAC, POD, MSNF, scoopability at your serving temperature. Tweak loads until everything sits inside its range.
  4. Auto-balance if you want Gelato Maestro to do the optimization for you, with or without cost as an objective.
  5. Make Gelato — pick a target quantity, batch count or batch freezer, check off ingredients as you weigh them, and mark the batch produced.
  6. Review the production in Production History or aggregate Statistics.

iCloud sync

Turn on iCloud Sync in Settings to keep your recipes, custom ingredients, batch freezers and production history aligned across every Mac, iPad and iPhone signed into the same Apple Account.

Before enabling on a second device Enable iCloud sync on one device first and give CloudKit a few minutes to push your library. Then enable it on the next device. Toggling the switch repeatedly during a sync can leave the local copy out of date until the next push completes.

Next steps