Introducing... Paula Campi (Paola from the Gelobar)
AB Commercial is pleased to introduce the latest addition to the Gelato and Ice Cream Team – Paula Campi. Many of our customers will already know Paula from her work as owner and gelato and pasticcheria chef at the Gelobar in Lygon Street, Melbourne.
Customers of A B Commercial will be impressed by Paula’s expertise with Gelato making and in patisserie. The staff at AB are both amazed and delighted at the beautiful dolce and other treats she offers her colleagues all the time – they are all going to have to watch their waistlines!
Rob Johnston, General Manager for AB Commercial, said “It’s wonderful to have Paula on board to broaden our skill-set here and to be able to offer even more value to our customers making patisserie, artisan gelato and industrial ice cream. Paula’s technical knowledge of operations in the gelato, chocolate and pasticcheria sector is unparalleled in Australia, and her advice and experience will help our customers make even better products for sale to their own consumers and diners”.
Paula was born in Ferrarra, Italy. She’s a mixture of Northern and Southern Italian, as her mother came from Calabria and her father from Emilia.
Food services and exquisite cakes, pastries, gelato and ice cream have always been part of Paula’s life. She started making cakes from age ten, including chou pastry, profiteroles and torte. Her grandmother was a pastry chef, and ran a pastry shop in the village of Acri in Calabria where Paula helped out in the summer holidays. The shop was very traditional and had a wood-fired oven.
When Paula went back home to Ferrara she earned pocket money working in the local pasticcheria, making cakes and pastries and serving customers.
Paula had earned a degree in Accountancy from the Scuola di Ragioneria and was studying Psychology at the University of Padova when she came to Australia in 1977 to learn the language. She started working part-time in cafes and restaurants in Carlton, making coffee at Il Mondo , and at nights helping the chef in the kitchens at Tre Botti making spaghetti marinara, ragu and lasagne. She met Tommaso Stramaglia in Carlton and together they opened a cake shop - Lucchini - Paula had no idea until then that Tommaso was one of Italy’s best known pastry chefs who had run the panettone manufacturing business for La Motta in Italy.
Together they opened the International Cake Shop which they later sold to a Sicilian family, so they opened the Lucchiora Chocolate Factory and the Marrons Glace House in Toorak which they sold in 1987. From Toorak they moved to Lygon Court where they opened Dulchior, manufacturing chocolates and Easter Eggs with massive contracts for large handmade products from major firms including Cadbury. Their largest eggs weighed in at over sixty kilograms!
In 1990 they moved to the Gelobar in Lygon Street, opposite the origional headquarters of AB Commercial, but Tommaso’s health was failing, and sadly he died in 1992 at far too young an age. Paula sold her interest in the Gelobar in 2009 and joined AB Commercial early in 2010. Paula demonstrates gelato and ice cream making at our Gelato School, and provides on-site customer training.
Paula is also available to answer your commercial gelato and industrial ice cream making questions, and to asist you with recipes using Bigatton ingredients, so feel free to give her a call.