Joe Ray

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Leave the gun.

Somewhere along the line, Sicily’s signature dessert must have won an award for the unhealthiest dessert imaginable. Looking conspicuously like a clogged artery, the best cannoli here combine large amounts of cheese, sugar, eggs and â€¦ pork fat.

Crunch into a good one, however, and the flavors and textures of the crisp shell surrounding the filling of subtly sweetened fresh ricotta cheese and all those bad thoughts disappear quickly.

It’s heaven in a tube.

Walk into Modica’s Antica Dolceria Bonajuto, one of Italy’s best-known chocolatiers, and the smell is heady.

You also need to be lucky enough to know that this is where some of Sicily’s best cannoli are created. Despite the chocolate and pastries in a glass box at the counter, cannoli are not on display, and that’s one of the secrets that Pierpaolo Ruta, the latest in a long, crooked family line of chocolatiers that spans back to 1880, claims isn’t a secret.

“We really donâ€™t have any secrets,” he said. Then he listed some. Who knows? Perhaps he considered them tricks.

Pierpaolo explains a couple like using red wine in the tube dough to give it more color and pushing the fresh ricotta through a sieve to give the filling an extra-creamy texture.

Ruta then sets a plate of snow-white pork fat under my nose.

“This is the smell of my grandfather,” he says.

I raise my eyebrow, quietly praying for some sort of cross-cultural miscommunication.

“When I think of my grandfather, I think of two smells: chocolate and cannoli.”

He boils the cannoli smell down to the scent of the vanilla they put in the filling and the frying oil for the shell. Plus, here in the land where butter is a bit of an oddity, some places will fold small amounts of it into the crust dough.

Ruta calls into the kitchen behind the shop and asks for a cannoli, giving me the feeling I’m getting something that’s not on the menu at a restaurant.

Here, and at any self-respecting cannoli maker, they’re made to order. This ensures that the moisture doesn’t migrate from the filling (where you want it) to the shell (where you don’t). Some places get around the problem by coating the inside of the tube with chocolate and busy places can rely on fast turnover to keep things relatively crunchy. For orders that aren’t for immediate consumption, Bonajuto customers are sent away with a box of shells and a bag of filling.

As for the house preference for frying oil, knock it only after trying it. You may find yourself making more space for pork products on your dessert plate.

This is Joe Ray reporting from the Motherland.