The Coffee Ice cream

Article by Michele Sergio published on IL ROMA the day 19 August 2018

Colorful, genuine, refreshing; with fruit or in sweet creams; rich in precious nutrients. We talk about ice cream the favorite food for adults and children during the hot season.

Already in Roman times we ate something similar to our ice cream and was called “nivatae potiones”, a sort of cold dessert, obtained by preserving in some caves the snow collected during the winters, then take it to the city during the warmer seasons, mixing it with fruit, juice and honey. Even Seneca cites these tasty fruit salads with honey and snow! Over the centuries ice cream will live a great evolution thanks to two characters: the architect Bernardo Buontalenti (16th century Florentine, considered by many to be the “father” of ice cream) who added to this recipe milk, cream and eggs and Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli (seventeenth-century Palermitan gentleman, who moved to Paris at the court of the Sun King) who inaugurated the first coffee-ice-cream parlor in history, still famous and renowned all over the world, the Procope coffee, where customers served their own portions of ice cream in various flavors. In Naples and throughout the Kingdom of Sicily under the Bourbons, ice cream was very popular and attracted admirers from all over Europe. There were real “snow routes” that were traveled to bring the ice from the snowy mountains to the caves beneath the city. The variety and the goodness of the Neapolitan ice-creams were so great that even after the unification of Italy, when Naples was no longer capital, people like the princess of Austria Sissi went to the Gambrinus to taste the violet ice-cream.

Today Naples is full of ice cream shops that offer both classic tastes and new tastes. The classic tastes are coffee, chocolate, hazelnut, pistachio, cream, fiordilatte, strawberry and lemon. Among these, the favorite from the Neapolitans is undoubtedly the coffee ice cream because it can be an excellent classic substitute cup in the torrid summer days.

But how can it be achieved in our homes? Firstly, prepare the coffee cream by putting in a small saucepan (one ingredient at a time and in the following order) 200g sugar, 200g cream, 50g butter and 2 cups of coffee. With the help of a whisk mix all the ingredients to create a coffee cream.

At the same time pour 400 grams of liquid cream into an ampoule and assemble it with the aid of an electric whisk; once the cream has been added, add the coffee cream that we have made before and mix the two compounds with the help of a wooden spoon until it becomes a single homogeneous mixture. Pour into a container suitable for the freezer and store it for about 12 hours.

Now you can pour our coffee ice cream into glasses or cups. Decorate with toasted coffee beans.