Pacojet vs Batch Freezer — Gelato Texture Compared
Table of contents
These two machines are usually described as alternatives. They are not. A batch freezer turns liquid mix into gelato by freezing it; a Pacojet takes gelato that is already frozen solid and shaves it smooth. Different physics, different recipes, different businesses.
Two machines, two different jobs
A batch freezer — the mantecatore of an Italian lab — receives the mix as a liquid at refrigerator temperature. The mix is pumped or poured into a horizontal or vertical cylinder whose wall is chilled well below freezing. Ice nucleates against that wall, a rotating dasher scrapes the frozen layer off continuously, and the same dasher beats air into the mass. The gelato is drawn out soft, typically somewhere between −6 °C and −9 °C, and goes straight into a blast chiller or a display well.
A Pacojet does none of that. The mix is portioned into a beaker and frozen static — the manufacturer specifies at least 24 hours at around −20 °C — until it is a solid block. At service, a blade spinning at roughly 2,000 rpm is driven down through that block under pressure, shaving off micro-thin layers. What lands in the beaker is smooth and cold and looks like gelato, but nothing was frozen in the process. The ice was already there; the machine only made the particles small.
That distinction drives everything else on this page.
What actually happens to the ice
Quick reference. A batch freezer creates small ice crystals by freezing fast under shear. A Pacojet creates large ice crystals slowly in a static freezer, then mechanically breaks them down at the moment of service. The result can taste equally smooth, but only one of them is stable in storage.
Perceived smoothness is a question of ice crystal size. Crystals below roughly 50 micrometres are not detected individually on the palate; above that, texture reads as coarse or icy. Dynamic freezing in a batch freezer keeps crystals small because nucleation happens continuously against a very cold wall and the dasher never lets a crystal grow undisturbed — the mechanism covered in ice crystal size and gelato texture.
Static freezing does the opposite. Left alone at −20 °C, a beaker of mix forms relatively few nuclei and grows them large. That block would be unpleasant eaten as-is. Pacotizing fixes the symptom mechanically, which works beautifully — and works only once. Refreeze the shaved product and the small particles will recrystallise into large ones, because nothing in the mix ever built the structure that resists it. Batch-frozen gelato has that structure and still needs stabilisers and a fast blast chill to keep it; pacotized product mostly assumes it will be eaten now.
Overrun, and why it changes the economics
Overrun is the air whipped into the mix, expressed as a percentage of the original volume. A batch freezer is built to control it: artisanal gelato normally sits between 25% and 35%, which is what gives the dense-but-not-heavy body the category is known for. A Pacojet incorporates very little air, because there is no dasher beating a liquid — the blade is cutting a solid.
That gap is not just texture, it is yield. A litre of mix run through a batch freezer at 30% overrun produces about 1.3 litres of sellable gelato. The same litre pacotized produces close to a litre. In a gelateria selling by volume, that difference lands directly on the margin, and it is why the display-case business runs on batch freezers. Our notes on overrun in gelato and measuring it cover the arithmetic.
Low overrun is not a defect, though. In a restaurant, a dense low-air quenelle next to a warm dessert is often exactly the intent, and the lack of air makes flavour read more intensely. Air cuts both ways on the plate: air cells lower the thermal diffusivity of the mass, so a high-overrun scoop insulates itself and melts more slowly, while a dense low-air one takes heat in faster, reads colder on the tongue and slumps sooner (Sofjan and Hartel, 2004). A quenelle that has to cross a dining room wins on plating, not on holding.
The same fact cuts the other way in a display case. Denser product is heavier per litre, colder to the tongue and harder to scoop at the same case temperature, which is part of why a batch-freezer recipe is balanced to sit softer in the first place.
What each machine demands from your recipe
This is where the two paths genuinely diverge, and where recipes get copied across and fail.
A batch-freezer mix has to be soft enough to scoop out of a display case at −12 °C to −14 °C. That means enough anti-freezing power in the sugar blend to keep a workable fraction of the water unfrozen at serving temperature. Balance it too low and the gelato sets like a brick in the case; the calculation is what PAC exists to track.
A Pacojet mix has the opposite constraint. It must freeze into a genuinely solid block at −20 °C. Push the sugars, alcohol or invert content high and the block never sets hard enough — the blade smears through a slushy core instead of shaving it, and the output is soupy. Recipes intended for pacotizing generally run a lower PAC than the same flavour built for a display case, and alcohol in particular has to be kept in check.
Fat behaves differently too. In a batch freezer, part of the structure comes from fat globules partially coalescing under the dasher's shear during freezing. In a Pacojet there is no shear during freezing at all, so that mechanism never happens and fat contributes richness rather than structure. Emulsifier choice matters much less as a result.
| Batch freezer | Pacojet | |
|---|---|---|
| Mix state at start | Liquid, ~4 °C | Solid block, ~−20 °C |
| Freezing | Dynamic, under shear | Static, in a freezer |
| Air incorporated | 25–35% typical | Very little |
| Output temperature | −6 °C to −9 °C | Near the block temperature |
| Ideal PAC | Higher, for case scoopability | Lower, so the block sets hard |
| Fat destabilisation | Central to structure | Essentially absent |
| Batch size | Several litres | Roughly one beaker |
| Best for | Display cases, volume | Plated desserts, on demand |
Holding, service and the practical decision
The honest way to choose is to start from how the product reaches the guest.
If gelato sits in a case and is scooped over hours, you need a batch freezer. Nothing else produces the air content, the draw temperature and the stored structure that a display well demands, and you will also want a blast chiller behind it to get through the recrystallisation-prone zone quickly.
If gelato is plated to order in small quantities across many flavours, the Pacojet's advantages are real: beakers are frozen days ahead, each flavour is independent, there is no minimum batch to justify, and nothing sits in a case losing quality. The cost is throughput and yield.
Both routes still require the mix to be pasteurised properly before it is frozen — the batch freezer does not sanitise anything, and neither does a blade. Freezing suspends microbial growth; it does not reduce a count that was already there, and a pacotized beaker may have sat frozen for a fortnight before service. See pasteurisation deep dive for the temperature-time combinations that matter.
There is also a middle path worth naming. Plenty of restaurants run a small batch freezer for the two or three flavours they sell in volume and keep a Pacojet for the long tail of one-off desserts. The machines are not competitors so much as tools with different minimum batch sizes, and the recipes for each should be balanced separately rather than shared.
For a shop being planned rather than run, the equipment sequence and its capital order are laid out in the gelato shop equipment startup list, and sizing the cylinder itself is covered in the batch freezer sizing guide.
Related Concepts
- Draw temperature explained — why −8 °C is the target
- Best gelato machine for beginners — the tier below a mantecatore
- Continuous freezers — what replaces a batch freezer at scale
- Do I need stabilisers? — the answer depends on how long it is held
- How to balance a gelato recipe — setting PAC for the machine you own
