Almond Extracts
May 2, 2007 - The Star-Ledger - Savor
NOTO, Italy—Almonds seem to be the ingredient of the moment in the United States, getting a huge boost from talk shows that tout the nut’s health benefits like helping to lower cholesterol and prevent colon cancer.
Here in Sicily, however, where almonds have been a staple for more than 1,000 years, they concentrate on the classics and keeping the flavorful nut up to date. Varieties like pizzuta d’Avola, fascionello and Romana are among the island’s biggest crops, and while California’s relatively recent entry into the game now dominates the global market, the Golden State’s offerings don’t hold much truck here.
The almond is part of both sweet and savory Sicilian dishes, but it’s in pastry shops and cafés where the nut’s potential is most clearly on display. At the unassuming Caffé Sicilia in the southern town of Noto, pastry master Corrado Assenza is one of the biggest advocates of Sicilian almonds.
Speak with a chef worth his salt and they’ll almost inevitably take a good hunk of time preaching the virtues of raw materials. 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 its place in the state of Sicilian pastry making.
Leaving a shot glass of almond milk in front of me, he walks away, returning only when I’ve finished it. He then places a jelly jar of his homemade 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.
“These are the bones,” he says, pointing at the jar on the table while shaking my knobby wrist. “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. Mixed with water, his almond cream becomes almond milk. Mixed with a bit of marmalade, it’s the perfect center to a delicate Danish.
“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 the millennium of Sicilian almond history, Assenza is not just sitting around recreating the classics. His prima case a fumo (“before it became smoke”) is layers of cocoa beans, almond, marzipan slices and something he calls “tobacco cream,” all topped with 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 olive oil (butter’s a rare bird here) and almond flour.
If this is a taste of the future, visitors to Noto should look forward to getting older in Sicily.
“We have too many ways to apply our tradition,” he says. “We can copy the past, or use our ability to interpret it with our eyes, mouth and senses. 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 least: tourists and the gastronomically uninterested.
“I remember 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 Caffé Sicilia get what he’s trying to do? Disturbingly, he dodges the question a bit, but he 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,” he says. “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 ice cream.
For Assenzo, a dreamy almond sorbet that uses a minimalist’s ingredient list is a tool to reach the “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 gentilesse. “You need to help them arrive with something simple.”
On the opposite end of the island, near Palermo, master pastry chef, master chocolatier and ice cream fanatic Santi Palazzolo traces the roots of Palermitan pastry making back to the almond.
While all across Sicily, marzipan is known as pasta reale and sculpted into anything from fruits and vegetables to sheep and little ham sandwiches, around Palermo it’s known as frutta di Martorana, named for noblewoman Eloisa Martorana.
“She ran a convent that helped both children and prostitutes (often with a rather direct link between members of the two groups),” he explains.
“During a famine, the wheat was lost, but they had almonds and sugar, so they’d make little sculptures of other foods that created the illusion that they were eating the real thing.”
“The convent’s occupants would hang the fruit from the trees at night, making it seem as though the fruit was put there by a higher power,” adds Palazzolo’s friend, Jean-Paul Barreaud, a tour guide and Sicilian history expert. “Sicilians are suspicious, but they’re religious.”
And they were hungry.
“This is the lineage of Palermo’s pastry chefs,” says Palazzolo.
Feeding the masses isn’t a foreign concept for the pastry chef. Several times, he’s made a traditional Sicilian cassata - a diet-busting ricotta-filled “cake” held together by a ring of almond-pistachio paste - for 4,000 people. He’s even made one in New York City, where he and his team smuggled what must have been several hundred pounds of fresh Sicilian ricotta across the ocean by bribing the crew with in-flight cannoli so they would help sneak it past customs.
While chef Assenza calls almond cream his “base,” Palazzolo divides the use of his almonds in his sweets into three groups: a Play-Doh-like paste of almond and sugar for frutta di Martorana, “pasta base,” which is the same paste further sweetened with honey and egg, and a third paste that gets a shot of pistachio paste to create the outer layer of his cassata.
Palazzolo gives me a spoonful of pasta base, which makes most mothers’ cookie dough taste like old Chips Ahoy! batter, and explains all of the baked goods it goes into.
He gestures toward the top row of a long display case with well over 20 kinds of confections, saying, “They’re all made with pasta base.”
Like Assenza, Palazzolo doesn’t rest on his laurels. Along with his classic cakes and cookies, he’s got several distinctly modern-looking cakes of his own design, most made with almonds.
Named for his daughter, his torta Laura combines almond milk in a cinnamon genoise, covered with a chocolate almond glaze. He’s also come up with an almond gelato that, using modern techniques and a lot of time, produces something that by itself is worth a trip to Sicily.
What’s his trick? Running it through a giant emulsifying machine for a whopping 24 hours. Fans of mouthfeel and much of the rest of humanity will find it time well spent.
So, after discussing Assenza’s and Palazzolo’s raft of almond-enhanced offerings and their philosophical and near-spiritual uses, what is Assenza’s favorite pastry?
“It’s the next one. It’s the one I haven’t thought of yet.”
In the meantime, the duo will let their creations be ambassadors of the good stuff to locals and tourists alike.
“Each cake,” Assenza concludes, “is part of a tale that brings you into our land.”
Joe Ray is a food and travel writer based in Paris. He may be reached via his Web site, www.joe-ray.com.
