Results tagged Slow Food from David Lebovitz

Technically this gelato isn’t ‘polenta’ ice cream, but it’s made with corn flour. But when I was in Torino, Italy last year, a local gelateria was making what they were billing as a ‘polenta’ gelato, using farina bóna.

So if you want to argue with an Italian chef, you’re welcome to. After tangling with puzzling bureaucratic paperwork for a disproportionately-large chunk of my days lately, I’m happy to just accept what people say, and no longer question the how’s and why’s. (Like when I got a customs bill for an unsolicited delivery last week that had a tax on the tax. To preserve my sanity, I’ve stopped trying to make sense of those kinds of things anymore.)

Plus “Flour Ice Cream”, somehow doesn’t have the same appeal.

I was happy, at long last, to get around the making gelato from this unusual ingredient that I picked up during the Slow Food event I’d attended. Unlike the derision* that similar events like this draw elsewhere (which was why I always avoided going), Monsieur Skeptic went with an unusually-open mind and was thrilled to discover so many unusual and nearly-extinct food products that the Slow Food Foundation is working to keep alive.

Farina bóna is deeply-roasted corn, ground into flour, which was produced in villages, such as Vergeletto, in Switzerland, which had just 90 inhabitants.

Continue Reading Polenta Ice Cream (Gelato di polenta)…

Now that I’ve had a few days to digest everything I tasted at the Salon del Gusto, I thought I’d show you a fraction of what was on offer.

The event was an unparalleled opportunity to sample foods from all over the world, with a focus on Italy, of course, since that’s where the event takes place. That meant an abundance of cured pork products and Italian cheese, like handmade ricotta which you could taste just after it’d been made, but also Mexican Chinantla vanilla beans, so ripe, fragrant and oily…and a few bars of chocolate stacked up here and there.

Continue Reading Slow Food: Salone del Gusto (Part 2)…

After returning from my first-ever visit to the Slow Food Salone del Gusto in Torino, Italy, on Monday, I began writing up the event, and looking at the photos I’d taken. As I wrote, I found myself writing a but at length of what this event was, and wasn’t, and how people (including me) perceive these kinds of events. I didn’t go with any agenda; I was simply interested in seeing what the Salone was all about, as I’d heard it was very interesting from some people I respected in the food world.

Unlike the perception I, and other folks have, the Salone del Gusto was not a bunch of rich, elitist folks swilling wine and congratulating themselves on what fabulous folks they were for going “green” or indulging in “peasant foods.”

Continue Reading Slow Food: Salone del Gusto (Part I)…