Spotlight: Sweet City Gelato

Sweet City Galato is the sugary coined gastro-truck from husband and wife confectioners Monika and Bill Tyler. Both from the northeast where a prevalent Italian-American culture melts even the most steel-hearted savory-lover at the summertime sight of gelato.
Monika's grandmother worked in a Brooklyn bakery and deli and stirred in her granddaughter a love for baking and feeding people. It was her step-dad who introduced Monika to gelato. For Bill, some of his fondest ancestral memories are of enjoying ice cream and gelato with his grandparents.
Several years ago, their growing family tripped to Italy for a spell and were thoroughly enamored with the artisanal gelato they found along the way. Monika was beginning to take her hunger for baking to the next level as she gifted delicacies to loved ones, and eventually selling them on a small scale.
As excitement for food trucks ramped up, Bill and Monika developed more and more flavors of their gelato with a devotion to the highest quality, freshest, and most sumptuous ingredients.
“We use hormone-free locally-sourced milk and cream Dakin Dairy Farm, east of Sarasota. It's a wonderful farm, a really cool place... It's not only sustainable, but ingenious because of the fact that the cows are grass-grazed and so healthy that there’s a difference in their milk and you can really taste that in our gelato.”
The family also seeks fresh, seasonal fruits and berries from across the region and imports their hazelnut paste directly form Piedmont, Italy.
The Tylers aren't content to rest their laurels simply on stellar gelato, but pairs their treats with Monika's other-worldly baked goods to create specialties such as their bananas foster bread pudding, which is often matched with a vanilla bean or a salted caramel crème. The family is also known for their gelato/cookie sandwiches, freshly filled with scoops of your choice.
What exactly is gelato? You may be wondering. It's a frozen treat similar to ice cream, but churned more slowly so that there's less air in the finished product and it is denser, but creamier. It's served at a slightly warmer temperature than ice cream and has less butterfat, so the ingredient flavors are more able to shine through.
Sweet City regularly stocks about 11 flavors on their truck and always has a few vegan options made for folks who are dairy-free. The sorbettos, as they are called, traditionally highlight a fresh fruit with a serious pop of color.
Monika is a lady with her pulse on culinary trends, so she loves to experiment with different profiles or ingredients.
“I really enjoy a lot of Latin and Asian flavors,” she confessed during an interview last week. “We are always looking at different types of spices and tropical fruits and how we can showcase them. Right now I'm obsessed with the manganese fruit, so I'm also working on a recipe for that and for a guava cheesecake.”
The Tylers take a lot of pride in their food truck and have recently expanded their enterprise to include an old school cart where the can bring the party with them to locales farther off the beaten path. This has permitted them to spread their sweet message to fêtes across the region.
Check out this gelateria on wheels as it rolls through on Saturday night during the Food Truck Bazaar from 5 to 9 p.m.

- Jessica Pirani, JessieBerger@yahoo.com.