Monday, October 08, 2007 Have a kuppa gelato, not 'ice cream' By Jay Gallera Malaga
GETTING lost in the labyrinth that is Venice. Lying around on a lazy Sunday afternoon at a park in Germany. Roaming around the ruins of old Rome. Waiting before the River Danube in Hungary. Walking among olive trees and the vineyards under the Tuscan sun.
It's fascinating how most of my treasured memories in my one-year stay in Europe involved a cone or a cup of ice cream in hand. Nothing really tastes like it. The ice cream, especially the homemade ones in Italy, that is. I just could not describe it. Everywhere I went, I always craved for a scoop or two of this frozen treat even during winter.
So it was really hard to let go of such cold addiction upon my return here. Surprisingly, before I got deeper into withdrawal phase, I found myself in a new coffee shop around the corner in the city's 'Chinatown' wolfing scoop after scoop of my favorite pistacchio (pronounced as pistaKYO by the Italians) gelato.
Yes, GE-LA-TO, the Italian word for ice cream. But the analogy ends there.
"Gelato and ice cream are not the same," said Karen Lo Tsai, owner of kuppa, that new coffee shop around the corner in the city's 'Chinatown' which offers the closest thing I could get to having my dose of Italian ice cream. Scusa, gelato I mean.
Aside from the use of fresh cow's milk, gelato is more compact (in terms of volume) having less air, and retains the flavor more making it tastier than the ordinary ice cream variety. This means that if you take a cup of gelato and another cup of ice cream, both of the same weight, when melted, you'd end up with more gelato because the proof of the difference vanishes into thin air in the case of the ice cream.
The gelato in Ms. Tsai's coffee shop is made fresh weekly by a partner from Cebu which uses both local and imported ingredients, and they come in different flavors, some of them still retaining their Italian names like bacio (pronounced as baCHO which means kiss) and stracciatella (vanilla with chocolate shavings).
Now this is something to melt for. Of course, kuppa still has a lot of other gastronomic pleasures on its menu like pasta and dessert, and its line up of coffee, tea, and even Italian sodas. But for this moment, I just have one thing to include in my library of treasured memories.
Reading a book by the window of a new coffee shop around the corner in the city's 'Chinatown.' A cup of gelato in hand. Ma certo. But of course.
