From Italy to Bend: Newport Avenue Market Is Making Housemade Gelato
What happens when the Newport Avenue Market team travels all the way to Italy in search of incredible food?
Well… apparently, we come home and start making gelato. 🍨🇮🇹
If you’ve spent any time at Newport, you know we take food pretty seriously. We love discovering things that are First, Best, or Different, whether that means finding an incredible product made right here in Central Oregon or traveling halfway around the world to learn from people who have been perfecting their craft for generations.
Recently, members of the Newport team traveled to Italy to source new products, visit farms and factories, meet producers, taste some truly incredible food, and bring a little more delicious inspiration home to Bend.
And somewhere along the way, we fell hard for gelato.
Learning From the Best
In Italy, food is more than something you eat. It is connected to place, tradition, ingredients, craftsmanship, and the people who make it.
As our team traveled, tasted, asked questions, and learned from producers, we started exploring what makes truly great Italian gelato so special. The texture. The intensity of flavor. The beautiful simplicity of good ingredients handled well.
Naturally, we wanted to know: Could we bring some of that magic home?
The answer was yes.
After learning, tasting, experimenting, and finding a gelato recipe we loved, we brought the idea back to Central Oregon and started doing what Newport does best.
We made it our own.
Now Churning at Newport Avenue Market
Today, our gelato is mixed, poured, churned, and made right here at Newport Avenue Market.
Our team is creating gelato daily, experimenting with flavors and ingredients, and having an awfully good time doing it. From rich brown butter to beautiful seasonal fruit flavors, there will always be a very good reason to peek into the deli and see what we’re churning.
And yes, quality control requires tasting.
A lot of tasting.
Very rigorous stuff. 😉
But Then We Added the Cookie…
Because apparently making housemade gelato wasn’t enough, we decided it needed a friend.
Enter our warm chocolate chip cookie.
Big. Soft. Chocolatey. Ooey gooey in the middle. Finished with a sprinkle of sea salt.
Pair a warm piece of that cookie with cool, creamy gelato and… well…
YUUUUUUUUMMMMM. 🍪🍨
The cookies can also be found in our freezer, ready to take home and bake whenever the need for an ooey gooey, warm-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookie strikes.
Which brings us to one unforeseen consequence of the whole gelato-and-cookie operation.
The Newport team appears to be taking “quality control” a little too seriously.
We have no explanation for this behavior.
Except perhaps that the gelato is really, really good.
A Little Taste of Italy, Made Right Here in Bend
For us, this is one of the most exciting parts of being an independent market.
We get to travel. We get to meet people who care deeply about what they make. We get to learn about food traditions from around the world, bring those ideas back to Central Oregon, and create something new for the people who have been shopping with us for 50 years.
