Jessie Oloroso

Jessie Oloroso picks up a handful of hazelnuts and rubs them between her hands, sending their blackened skins floating to the baking sheet beneath them. “Nobody wants to be bothered with pastry,” she says. “If you don’t have a pastry chef and it falls upon the executive or the sous—which it usually does—or to some poor prep cook, generally people hate having to do it.” Her hands are dark with hazelnut skin as she drops the nuts and picks up another batch. “A pastry program and pastry chef is the first thing that will be looked at when cuts need to be made,” she continues. “Because you can outsource. You can buy the ice cream from someone else.”

She’s speaking from experience. After graduating from Johnson & Wales with a bachelor’s in pastry, Oloroso was the pastry chef at the United Center for two and half years. Following that, she joined Scylla for that restaurant’s tenure. But now she’s full time at her own company, Black Dog Gelato. The outsourceable pastry chef has become the outsourcing solution.

Oloroso takes the skinned hazelnuts and drops them into her blender. She pours in a vanilla custard and turns it on high, pureeing the nuts and releasing their oils. The thing she likes about gelato—the reason she turned to making it full time as opposed to, say, making cupcakes—is its resilience. “You don’t have to be really gentle with it, like you would have to be with sugar work or other stuff that pastry chefs have to deal with,” she says. At Scylla, Oloroso was more likely to use the grill for her desserts than the oven. In her downtime, she’d make ravioli or clean octopus. And when chef Stephanie Izard had a day off, Oloroso would take her place and expedite. She did this to stay valuable to the kitchen and keep her job, but also because it indulged who she really is as a chef. “I’m not one of those people that sits there and measures everything out exactly and follows recipes to a T. I do things by look, by feel—like how you see someone cook, you know?”

She takes a plastic spoon and tastes the custard, now infused with hazelnut, then pours it into her ice-cream machine. Oloroso has two machines, and each produces half-gallon batches. But she’s fulfilling 50 to 60 gallons worth of orders a week, supplying gelato to restaurants like Sepia, Piccolo and Uncommon Ground. To keep up with the demand she’s working 12-hour days, six days a week. (She’d work seven days, but the kitchen she rents is closed on Sundays.) As the sole company employee, she makes the gelato and does everything else, including delivering it in coolers in the back of her Saturn and recruiting new clients. She has flavors that have become her signatures—her whiskey gelato comes to mind, as does her salted peanut. But until she opens her own place (possibly at the end of summer), she will continue to be the gelato source of other people’s desserts. Which, for the time being, suits her fine. Because with no hungry customers waiting in a dining room, she never has to send out a gelato she’s not proud of. “When I eat a bad gelato, whether or not it’s mine or someone else’s, I want to throw it away. I don’t want to eat it. It definitely interferes with my enjoyment of something if it’s not right.”

The ice-cream maker turns off, and Oloroso walks toward it.

“Now,” she says. “Let’s see if this stuff is any good.”