Vegan Gelato Ingredients in Brazil: What to Buy and Swap

Vegan gelato in Brazil is easier than imported recipe books suggest. Coconut milk, cashews, Brazil nuts, cassava starch and cane sugar are local staples; the rest sits with confectionery suppliers. Here is the Portuguese shelf name for each ingredient, the swap when you cannot find it, and a balanced 1,000 g base.

Most of a Brazilian vegan base comes from the supermarket. The gums and the sugars that fix the freezing point come from a confectionery supplier.

What a Vegan Base Needs, and Where Brazil Covers It

A plant based gelato has to rebuild what milk gives a dairy base for free: fat for creaminess, solids for body, sugars that set the freezing point, and gums that hold the water. The complete vegan gelato guide explains the theory. Here is the shopping list, sorted by job, with the name you will see on the shelf.

The INS numbers are the ones ANVISA uses for these gums. Resolution RDC 201/2005 lists them by name: INS 410 goma jataí (alfarroba, garrofina, caroba), INS 412 goma guar and INS 415 goma xantana. Search a supplier catalogue by the INS number and the commercial name stops mattering.

Fats and Proteins: Coconut, Cashew and Brazil Nut

Fat is where Brazil is strongest. Three local sources cover almost every vegan flavour.

1. Leite de coco (coconut milk). The fat backbone of most plant bases. Our ingredient database uses a coconut milk at 21% fat and 26% total solids. Your carton may not match that line, so read the fat per 100 g on the nutrition panel before you weigh anything. If your carton is leaner, the fat target moves and the app recalculates. More on coconut fat in coconut milk for vegan gelato.
2. Castanha de caju (cashew). Cashew is native to the Brazilian Northeast and an important source of income for rural producers in states such as Ceará, Piauí and Rio Grande do Norte. A 100% cashew paste in our database carries 47% fat and 18% protein, which makes it the most neutral body builder you can buy. Make your own paste from raw nuts or buy it ready. See cashew milk gelato for the lighter, drink based version.
3. Castanha-do-pará (Brazil nut). Fattier than cashew: 66% fat in a 100% paste, with a stronger, slightly earthy flavour. ANVISA accepts both castanha-do-brasil and castanha-do-pará as the common name on a label.

For a dairy free drink rather than a fat, the supermarket shelf has bebida de aveia and bebida de soja. They carry far less fat than coconut milk, so they work as the liquid part of the base, not the creamy part. Our database has an unsweetened soy drink at 2.1% fat and 3.5% protein, the highest protein of the plant drinks in our database. The trade offs are in soy milk gelato and oat milk gelato.

For dark chocolate flavours, manteiga de cacau adds hard fat that sets firm in the display. A study from the Federal Institute of Santa Catarina (IFSC) built a vegan frozen dessert on cashew, oat drink, demerara sugar, cocoa butter and cumaru, and most of its 58 untrained tasters said they liked it very much. The handling rules for that fat are in cocoa butter in gelato.

Sugars and Fibres: What Each Brazilian Sugar Does

Brazil's sugar aisle is wide, but only part of it belongs in a balanced base.

• Açúcar cristal and açúcar refinado are sucrose, the reference sugar at POD 100 and PAC 100, so either works in the same weight.
• Açúcar demerara is lightly refined. Brazilian food researchers note that cristal and demerara are the two sugars the country produces most at industrial scale. Its flavour is warmer than refined sugar. We have no measured line for demerara, so balance it from the sugar figure on its label.
• Açúcar mascavo (muscovado) keeps the molasses. Our database line is POD 96 and PAC 99 per 100 g, close to sucrose with a caramel note.
• Rapadura is a block of evaporated cane juice. We have no measured line for it, so treat it as a flavour in small amounts, not as the main sugar.

The real gap in a supermarket is the sugars that lower the freezing point without adding much sweetness. Dextrose has PAC 173 and POD 64 per 100 g as monohydrate, so it softens the scoop while it keeps sweetness down. Glicose em pó (dried glucose syrup) adds body with low sweetness: our line is PAC 72 and POD 44 per 100 g. Ask the supplier for the DE on the spec sheet, and if the sheet says dextrose monohydrate, it is dextrose, not glucose powder. The roles of each sugar are compared in the sugar selection guide.

Inulina fills the solids that milk powder would give a dairy base, with zero PAC and zero POD in our database. The inulin guide suggests 40 to 70 g per 1,000 g in vegan gelato.

Quick reference. A Brazilian vegan base runs on leite de coco plus a nut paste for fat, açúcar cristal or refinado for sweetness, dextrose and glicose em pó for the freezing point and body, inulina for solids, and goma guar plus goma jataí (INS 412 and INS 410) for stability. The canon target for a creamy vegan base is PAC 220 to 310, POD 130 to 195 and 35 to 42% total solids.

Figure 1. Where each part of the 1,000 g base comes from, and how the totals land inside the creamy vegan ranges.

Worked Example: A 1,000 g Base Bought in Brazil

This is a neutral white base, built only from the ingredients in the table above. The numbers come from the ingredient database behind the free balancing calculator, and the targets are the canon ranges for a creamy vegan base.

PAC: 246 · POD: 183 · Total Solids: 38.9% · Fat: 10.2% · MSNF: 0% · sugars 21.3% · water 61.1% · protein 1.8%.

Every value sits inside the creamy vegan canon: total solids 35 to 42%, sugars 17 to 24%, POD 130 to 195, PAC 220 to 310, fat 7 to 13%, water 58 to 65% and protein 1 to 3.5%. With PAC 246, the display rule of PAC divided by minus 20 puts the base at about minus 12 °C, inside a normal -11 to -14 °C gelato cabinet.

Method: whisk the guar and the jataí into the dry sugars first, so the gums do not clump. Blend the cashew paste into the coconut milk and water, add the dry mix, and heat to 85 °C, because locust bean gum needs heat to hydrate. Cool fast and age for a few hours before batch freezing. For a ready made recipe card of a similar base, see the vegan coconut milk gelato recipe.

What Is Hard to Find, and the Swap That Keeps the Balance

Not every shop carries every line. Here is what happens to the same 1,000 g base when you make the common swaps, calculated with the same database.

The third line is the trap. Replace dextrose gram for gram with sucrose and the base gets sweeter and harder at the same time: POD rises above 195 and PAC falls below 220. If dextrose is not available, rebalance in the app instead of swapping by weight. Without a glucose syrup at all, the options are in glucose syrup substitutes for gelato, and the dextrose numbers are in the dextrose guide.

Other swaps that come up in Brazilian shops:

• No goma jataí: guar alone works but feels slightly gummy. The ratios and alternatives are in the vegan stabilizer blend guide, and the hydration temperatures are in locust bean gum in gelato.
• No gums at all: fécula de mandioca thickens a cooked base. In some Brazilian regions the same product is called polvilho doce or goma. Embrapa describes it as about 18% amylose and 82% amylopectin. Dosing is in tapioca starch in gelato.
• Lecithin: soy lecithin works, but on a Brazilian label it brings a soy allergen statement. Sunflower lecithin avoids it; see sunflower vs soy lecithin.

Labels and Allergens in Brazil

If you sell the gelato packaged, Brazilian allergen labelling applies. ANVISA's allergen rule, RDC 26/2015, requires the warning "ALÉRGICOS: CONTÉM" followed by the common name, for example "ALÉRGICOS: CONTÉM CASTANHA-DE-CAJU". Derived ingredients use "CONTÉM DERIVADOS DE", and ANVISA lists soy lecithin as a soy derivative. Check the current consolidated text on ANVISA's site before you print labels.

Three points matter for a vegan base:

1. Cashew, Brazil nut, peanut and soy are on ANVISA's list of major allergens. Oat is covered too, in the group of wheat, rye, barley and oat. ANVISA's guidance adds that any product with an intentional or cross contact warning for these cereals must say "CONTÉM GLÚTEN", which matters if your base uses bebida de aveia.
2. Coconut and cassava are not. When the rule was written, ANVISA received requests to add them and did not accept them, citing the lack of prevalence data for the Brazilian population and of international consensus.
3. "PODE CONTER" (may contain) is for cross contact. ANVISA only allows it after the business has an allergen control programme in place, and a product that intentionally contains cashew declares "CONTÉM", never "PODE CONTER", for cashew.

A vegan label says nothing about nuts. If your vitrine shares scoops and blenders with a pistachio or hazelnut gelato, the customer needs to know.

Related Concepts

• Complete vegan gelato guide
• Coconut milk for vegan gelato
• Cashew milk gelato
• Vegan stabilizer blend
• Glucose syrup substitutes for gelato
• Inulin in gelato
• Vegan banana gelato recipe