All things italian: Food memories
I have some very distinctive food memories that will imprinted on my memory. One of my very first memories occured when I lived in Freiburg Germany in the Schwarzwald (Black Forest) as a high school exchange student with Rotary Club. Not only did I spend a whole year with my three different Germany families learning to bake and create typical Germany dishes which are posted elsewhere, but I was also able to travel to a large number of neighboring countries. On one of those trips, I spent spring break with my friend, Ulriche, in Italy. Loving Italy is not difficult. Ask 100 people that travel if they love Italy and all 100 will say that they do. How can you not? To not love Italy means you are either clinically brain dead, or a very, very, very horrible person. Very horrible. The type of person you should run away from at top speed. Why must you love Italy? Italy offers amazing wine, types of mushrooms I have not seen anywhere else, unique cheeses, big slabs of roasted meat but for me, my
trip to Italy with Ulriche involved the tasting of two Italian foods that I never knew could task like they did: Pizza & Gelato. I grew up eating pepperoni pizza at Shakey’s and banana splits at Baskin and Robbins. Not don’t get me wrong, I will love Shakey’s and B&R but my mind was actually blown the first time I put a bite of Neapolitan pizza into my mouth or when I licked my first stracciatella gelato.
So… Italian gelato. Take the deliciousness of a regular ice-cream cone, times it by a million, then sprinkle it with crushed-up unicorn horns.
― Jenna Evans Welch, Love & Gelato
Jenna gives us even more insight into my favorite flavor, stracciatella:
… Literally translating into “rags” or “shards,” stracciatella is made by drizzling a fine stream of melted chocolate into the churning ice cream. The chocolate solidifies on contact, freezing into ethereal flakes that fuse with the ice cream and literally melt in your mouth.
Why no picture? It LOOKS just like chocolate chip ice cream, but it TASTES like it is sprinkled with 
crushed up unicorn horns. I have eaten many stracciatella gelatos in the US and never once got that magic moment. I finally decided that I had just imagined it until Elena, Tara and I went to Sorrento. We stopped on our second day at a convenient Gelato store called Raki. It was cute, sure, we wanted gelato, sure. One lick of my first cone and I remember the magic of REAL italian gelato? Why is it different? Maybe you need happy, italian speaking cows for the milk. Maybe you need happy italians making the gelato. Maybe you need only fresh ingredients with the product made in small batches. Who knows but it is different. This, then, brings me to food memory #2 which is Italian Pizza. The king of italian pizzas is the Neapolitan variety.
Neapolitan pizza, or pizza Napoletana, is a type of pizza that originated in Naples, Italy. Neapolitan pizza is prepared with simple and fresh ingredients: a basic dough, raw tomatoes, fresh mozzarella cheese, fresh basil, and olive oil—no fancy toppings. One of its defining characteristics is that there is often more sauce than cheese, leaving the middle of the pie wet or soggy and not conducive to being served by the slice. –The Spruce Eats
So, obviously, from the description it is really in the ingredients but it is also in the in the cooking as Neapolitan pizza is cooked at very high temperatures in specialized pizza ovens. I loved this picture from our favorite pizza spot in Naples. The green pizza oven was beautiful and churned out perfect Neapolitan Pizza. Can’t travel to Naples in the near future? Try Caffe Calabria in North Park for the San Diegans. For the gelato? I still haven’t found it….. That might just take a trip to Sorrento.
