Watch Bondi Beach gelato-maker George Pompei churn out the most perfect ice-cream, using only fresh seasonal fruit and pure Sicilian pistachios.

Melbourne-born Aussie Italian George Pompei spent almost two decades in Italy learning the trade and ran a small gelateria in Sardinia – at Porto Tondo where the Aga Khan used to hang out – before coming home to open here.

In his spotless, stainless-steel kitchen, he uses mainly raw ingredients to make his product, balancing the sugars, milk, cream and natural stabilisers that are all part of his trade with fresh fruit, chocolate, vanilla and other flavours. Nut pastes – like a superb Sicilian pistachio and a hazelnut paste from Piemonte (north-west Italy) – he buys ready-to-go from gelato product suppliers, saying he couldn’t possibly match the quality by starting from scratch.

Every day he makes up a batch of “white base” as the mix of milk, cream, cane sugar, dextrose (corn sugar), other sugars as required and natural stabilisers. The white base is used for the cream and nut flavours displayed in curlicued swirls in his chrome and glass counter, while there’s a separate base for the rich, thick chocolate he makes with a mix of cocoa powder and melted Valrhona couverture.

Both bases are pasteurised and ‘aged’, usually overnight, before being poured in smaller quantities into a batch freezer (a churn, in layman’s terms) and then effectively snap frozen, in what’s known as a blast freezer, to retain the gelato’s smooth, fluffy texture and prevent any un-frozen water particles from forming nasty icy bits.

His sorbet-style Bellini - using white peach and Prosecco - is simply a churned pulp of fresh fruit, skin and all, sugar, natural stabiliser and a little water. And the freshly churned chocolate is quite simply, divine.