Sorbetto has nowhere to hide. Gelato carries dairy fat and milk solids that soften rough edges, but a fruit sorbetto is essentially water, sugar and fruit held in suspension, which promotes tap water from background utility to listed ingredient. Anyone making it in the Las Vegas valley learns early that the local water is hard, and that hardness turns up in the finished spoonful and in the equipment that produced it.
Scale is the part you can see. Minerals drop out of hot water and coat the inside of boilers, fill lines, solenoids and ice machines. In an affogato program that shows as an espresso machine whose recovery time creeps upward and whose group heads need attention more often than the manual suggests. In a batch kitchen it shows as slower fills, noisier valves, and a dish sink that never quite gets to temperature.
The rest of a dessert kitchen's water story is plumbing in the plainest sense. A three-compartment sink and a hand sink have to sit where the health district expects to find them. Floor drains have to carry dairy-heavy waste without going sour. Moving into a new suite means running supply and waste for equipment that did not exist when the space was framed, and doing it in a way that passes inspection the first time.
Anyone about to spend money on this should walk in with three questions rather than a product name. What is the actual hardness at this address, measured at the tap and not quoted from a regional average. What is peak demand across the batch freezer, the espresso machine, the ice maker and the dish sink running together, since a softener sized for a household will regenerate constantly in a shop. And does the espresso machine get its own supply line with its own shutoff, so a service call on it does not close the counter for the afternoon.
Softening and filtration get treated as an appliance purchase and then handled badly. They are plumbing work, tied into the main and sized against real demand. A.A. Cassaro Plumbing, which lists water softener installation, repair and replacement alongside commercial build-out and tenant improvement work, is one local option for anyone weighing that job for a shop or for a home kitchen.
There is a home version of this experiment and it costs almost nothing. Make granita, sorbet or iced coffee twice, once with filtered water and once straight from the tap, taste them cold and side by side, and find out how much of the valley is showing up in your dessert.