Joe Ray

Friday, May 15, 2009

Let Mom Eat Cake

NOTO, SICILY

I’m back in The Motherland.

It’s a work/play trip that includes bringing my parents to the land of our Sicilian ancestors for the first time. My sister and I are English, Irish, French, Italian, Dutch and German mutts, but it’s always been the Sicilian side – via our paternal grandmother – that we identify with most as a family.

I’m playing tour guide so the induction is based on food and Day One includes a visit to pastry chef Corrado Assenza’s appropriately named Caffè Sicilia.

While Assenza’s ideas and creations can be otherworldly, he’s a product-sourcing freak. If he can’t do it perfectly, he won’t do it.

His almond gelato not only tastes like an almond in another state, but even has the slight tannic tang from the almond skin along with a mix of minerals and salt in the skin that makes Sicilian almonds unique.

We also try a “Traversata del Deserto” – a cake that includes mint, black tea, lemon rind, sea salt and “lyophilized” (freeze-dried) algae. It’s the kind of thing that Mom would try but stop after one bite.

Instead, she makes a funny grunting noise, almost like she’s disappointed.

“I’m sorry for all the cakes that will come after this in my life.”

Caffè Sicilia MAP
Corso Vittorio Emanuele, 125
Noto, Sicily

Full disclosure: Assenza, who I’ve interviewed and written about in the past, came out to say hello while we were there, but we paid our bill and you can’t bake a cake or make gelato on the fly.

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Sunday, May 25, 2008

Hello, old friends

One of the nicest pleasures about being back in the Motherland is seeing everyone and everything again, picking up almost exactly a year to the day after I was here last. There are things to catch up on, there’s a slight seasonal shift, but an overall feeling of being home.

Francesco’s aunt Pinuccia, knowing I’m a sucker for good cheese, left a big hunk of a crumbly truffle-infused artisanal formaggio she’d picked up on a trip to northern Italy in my fridge. Usually, truffle-infused anything sets off little warning signals in my mind that read: “overpriced bunk”. Not here.

We had a bite of the cheese and the truffles did what truffles are supposed to do: reach through your tongue and mouth like smoke, gradually settling into your senses like no other food can.

The next day, I ran into the farmer who sells still-warm ricotta out of the back of his truck. Two euros ($3) for raw milk bliss.

More recently, after starting the day with gelato from the nearby supermarket bar, Francesco and I stopped by Caffé Sicilia in Noto to see what Corrado Assenza – arguably Italy’s best pastry chef – has been up to.

I had a cup of ricotta and pistachio gelato, the latter being the star, with a cake-like texture and beguiling simplicity. Francesco shared exactly one bite of his ‘orange salad’ gelato, based on a typical Sicilian dish that uses oranges, olive oil ultra-fresh onions. Barely sweet, the gelato went from an orange flavor to a vegetable one. It’s one of those experiences that short-circuits your brain and leaves you with a smile on your face.

Finally, I made a quick lunch the other day – a pasta with a sauce that’s so simple it feels like cheating: chopped up tomatoes, large amounts of good olive oil, salt and a bit of crushed garlic that all bubbles away while the pasta water is coming to a boil. In a moment of inspiration, I shaved bits of Pinuccia’s cheese over the pasta, the truffle’s potency and the sweetness of the cheese magnified by the warmth of the pasta.

Simple, complex, happy.

This is Joe Ray reporting from the Motherland.

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Friday, March 23, 2007

The Four Senses of Corrado Assenza

Talk with enough chefs worth their salt and they’ll almost inevitably take a good hunk of time to preach the virtues of the importance of raw materials.

At an unassuming café in the southern Sicilian town of Noto, pastry master Corrado Assenza dwells on such things for about 20 seconds before he launches into the culinary stratosphere on a gastro-philosophical jag that explains both the primacy of the almond and the overall state of Sicilian pastry making.

Leaving two shot glasses of almond milk in front of Francesco and me, Italy’s 2006 pastry chef of the year walks away, returning only when we’ve finished. He then places a jelly jar of almond cream on the table saying, “This is the base. From this, you can make everything.”

It’s pretty much the first thing he’s said and it’s not terribly clear what ‘everything’ means, but he explains.

Mixed with water, almond cream becomes almond milk. Mixed with a bit of marmalade, it’s the perfect center to a delicate brioche.

“These are the bones,” he says, pointing at the jar on the table while grabbing my knobby wrist and shaking it, “We need bones to make this body.”

‘This body’ is Sicilian pastry as a whole and I feel downright flattered to serve as the example.

“We have about 80 products that we make here and about 30 that use almonds and still others where it’s just to give a bit of the taste.”

Despite more than 1,000 years of Sicilian almond history, in both sweet and savory dishes, Assenza is not sitting around just recreating the classics. His prima case a fumo (“before it became smoke”) is layers of what he calls tobacco cream, cocoa beans, almond and marzipan slices, topped with a strawberry cream. He’s also come up with what he calls insalata di frutta in coppa di mandorle (“fruit salad in an almond cup”), a curious and delicious cousin to strawberry shortcake, where the ingredients of the ‘cup’ include almond flour and olive oil (butter’s a rare bird here).

If this is what the future will be like, visitors to Noto should look forward to getting older in Sicily.

“We have too many ways to apply our tradition. We can copy the past, or use our ability to…interpret it with our eyes, mouth and senses,” he says. “I prefer the second way.”

One of Assenzo’s biggest preoccupations is getting this mix of old and new to the people who might understand or appreciate it the least: tourists and the gastronomically uninterested.

“I remember the when travelers used to come through here in the 60s,” he says, calling the set “Byron Travelers” as they might set up camp in Noto for months at a time.

Now, however, people have morphed into what he refers to – without bitterness – as ‘click and run’ tourists.

So do the lucky ones who happen into Caffe Sicilia get what he’s trying to do?

Disturbingly, he dodges the question a bit, but answers with optimism.

“Now, people arrive with their guide books in hand. I say, ‘Please, close your eyes. Use your ears.’ People aren’t unable to use their senses,” he affirms.

“The key is food. Sweet food.”

Along with their sense of hearing, he says he tries to create a connection to Sicily using color, texture and flavor.

He also uses basil ice cream.

It’s disarming stuff that short circuits your senses, leaving you with only goose bumps and a grin as descriptors.

For Assenzo, basil ice cream and a dreamy almond sorbet – both of which have a minimalist’s ingredient list – are tools to reach ‘click and run’ kids from Sicily and abroad.

“They have other kinds of experience, so you should commence with something special,” he explains with Zen gentillesse. “You need to help them arrive with something simple.”

It isn’t as simple as it sounds to get something like this to work.

“We use technology so we don’t damage the taste of the basil leaves,” he explains. “It took one and a half years to come up with something so we could arrive at this.” In Sicily, where man’s relationship with technology is peculiar at best, this guy is an outright visionary.

So, after discussing his raft of offerings and their philosophical and near-spiritual uses, what’s his favorite dessert?

“It’s the next one. It’s the one I haven’t thought of yet.”

In the meantime, he’ll let his creations be ambassadors of the good stuff to locals and tourists alike.

“Each cake,” he concludes, “is part of a tale that brings you into our land.”

This is Joe Ray reporting from the Motherland.

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