How to make a won­der­ful Ital­ian choco­late ice-cream

Choco­late ice-cream

Italy is well known as ice-creams´ moth­er­land and Ital­ians and tourists can guar­an­tee the high qual­ity of it exten­sively and directly from my tongue. The first ice cream is as ancient as the Roman Empire and even more, in fact some sim­i­lar con­coc­tion, a mix of snow and fruits, would have been pop­u­lar then among then among Mid­dle East countries.

Ice-cream his­tory

Whereas the first ice-cream-like recipe comes from an ancient Roman Quinto Fabio Mas­simo, the Ara­bian who moved to Siciliy in the late 800d.C. used to pro­duce the same iced food with a mix of cane sugar.

Deli­cious!

That would have been the ori­gin of the famous granita in the way it is nowa­days known, as one of the most famous gas­tro­nomic Sicil­ian del­i­ca­cies and a good alter­na­tive to the ice-cream on the warmest days.

The real ice-cream as we eat it today owes its birth to 2 men: Rug­geri, an unknown cook who pre­pared it for the wed­ding day of Cate­rina de´ Medici in Tus­cany and Francesco Pro­co­pio dei Coltelli, a Sicil­ian chef who made the ice cream a busi­ness and invented the first ice-cream machine. He opened the first ice-cream shop called Café Pro­cope in Paris in 1686. Many Ital­ian ice-cream shops are cur­rently named the same or in a sim­i­lar way to honor the tra­di­tion. How­ever, the name Café given to the first ice-cream shop was assigned to it because of the wide range of intel­lec­tu­als, philoso­phers
and lit­er­ary men crowd­ing the Café at the time.

Enjoy!

The rep­u­ta­tion attained as “The most famous Euro­pean café” helped to spread the noto­ri­ety and pro­duc­tion of ice-cream itself.

Ice-cream com­pe­ti­tion

The prize for the most tasty ice-cream in the world is awarded every 2 years at the con­test called Ice-Cream World Cup . Teams of 4 ice-cream mas­ter com­ing from dif­fer­ent coun­tries chal­lenge each other to cre­ate ice-cream sculp­tures, cakes, impres­sive ice-cream wafers, ice– cream bowls sup­ported by iced sculp­tures. This exhi­bi­tion is evi­dence of the mas­ters´ cre­ativ­ity and fan­tasy which much more often set apart the Ital­ian style and pro­mote hand­made ice-cream internationally.

Home­made ice-cream, an Ital­ian recipe

As for home­made ice-cream I would sug­gest a suc­cess­ful choco­late ice-cream recipe whose tasti­ness is spread­ing out between my expat Ital­ian friends in Switzer­land. I would pro­pose you use organic prod­ucts as I do and high qual­ity Swiss choco­late world wide known and dis­trib­uted like Lindt, these will extremely boost the final result. Then I rec­om­mend using an Ital­ian choco­late as well, and pro­pose Perug­ina, but it is not so broadly dis­trib­uted. In case you find it by chance the best buy is the choco­late bar for con­fec­tionary (cioc­co­lata per pas­tic­ce­ria) which is dis­tin­guish­able beyond the name through its big choco­late chunks. Fur­ther­more you would need an ice-cream machine, if you have the oppor­tu­nity to buy an Ital­ian one do not pass up the chance to buy a Symac prod­uct. My mother has been using the same Symac ice-cream machine for 20 years.

Ingre­di­ents:

1 yolk

5 spoons of sugar

200 grams fresh and full white cream

1 glass an half of full milk

200 grams dark choco­late Lindt 70%

Prepa­ra­tion:

Break the choco­late into pieces and melt it in a bain-marie (ves­sel con­tain­ing hot water in which another pot is placed to heat its con­tents) or in the microwave. Pay atten­tion not to burn it. After­wards put all ingre­di­ents in a mixer. When you noticed that the white cream is whipped (the mix­ture stays liq­uid but it raises its vol­ume) put every­thing in your ice-cream machine and wait till it is done. Once it is con­densed put it in the refrig­er­a­tor. Usu­ally home­made ice-cream takes time to freeze and time to melt down. So remove it from the freezer 15 min­utes before serv­ing it.

Enjoy!