The sweetest final curtain

Were not the typical elements of a quiz show so distant from him, he could be defined as the super champion of Identità Golose: eleven participations, a record without parallel. Yet the nature of the savoury pastry chef from Noto, Corrado Assenza, is intimately connected with the course of the seasons, the stars, the earth and the sky and places him “on the foreshore that sees marine sweetness and earthly sapidity”, rather than on the cathode ray tube and its derivatives. The lesson held by the Sicilian master at Identità Golose 2015 travelled on the thread that marks the equidistance between gustatory worlds that never before him had dared to contaminate each other.

“Sweet thoughts of material food culture” was the theme, narrated starting from an intimate diary through a sequence of photos on the stage of the Auditorium, frames from the open air basked from which Assenza draws the food treasure that first ends in the laboratory and then among the eternal memories of those who happen to visit him at Caffè Sicilia. Almond gems, peaches, plums, apricots, summer fruits. “A reserve battery that allows to offer sweet thoughts all year round”, is the new frontier on Assenza’s horizon, an explorer who is never satisfied with having crossed a border and is already set for the next trip.

“We’re trying to understand how to detach ourselves from seasonality and offer the freshness of a product, a fruit, all year round, preserving its flavour at the very moment of its highest expressive potential, with a minimal technical intervention”. The profoundly avantgarde, necessary evolution in this case means applying state of the art techniques to pull down frontiers, even those of seasonality, while respecting nature’s results. These are goals that can be reached by Assenza without climbing on the cross of locally-sourced-product fanaticism. It was following these coordinates that the pastry chef dished out his interludes – morsels that had no precise place within the meal, as a consequence of the sweet and savoury contamination – as in the case of the oyster with bergamot from Calabria, beetroot, borage and fior di latte cream aromatised with gin. A deeply eloquent example of the melting pot ideas under the Assenza brand, all of which had to pass the tasting (and swoon) of Gabriele Zanatta, Identità Golose’s editor in chief, a brotherly friend of the master from Noto and kindred by choice.

The long afternoon of Dossier dessert, organised in collaboration with the Ecole du Grand Chocolat Valrhona, included, among its protagonists, also Kei Kobayashi of the homonymous restaurant in Paris, destined to proximity with the great masters since after the seven-years spent with Ducasse, he had the honour of enjoying the presence in the audience of Gualtiero Marchesi, who surprised with his presence at the lecture. Kobayashi presented desserts with a clear Japanese mark, thus profoundly focused on citrus fruits, with the aroma of yuzu, for instance, fruits that are available all year round in the Land of the Rising Sun. One of the delicacies presented on stage was the white chocolate mousse with glazed orange, filled with grapefruit-orange cream and candied yuzu, towered over by a meringue aromatised with clementine.

After the Japanese master who moved to Paris, the spotlights were shining on a very young master in the global pastry making scene, 2011 world champion Josep Maria Rodriguez Guerola, sweet chef at La pastisseria Barcelona and author of Sweetology, a delicious handbook and a sui generis recipe book, since among the various recipes presented the place of honour goes to eight creations dedicated to as many chefs at the top of Iberian gastronomy. That is to say sweet interpretations of savoury recipes by the chefs to whom they are inspired, including a dessert dedicated to the master of El Celler, Jordie Roca, a smile in the shape of a “jack in the box” filled with lemon cream, a cloud of yuzu, small pearls of coffee. It appears it left even the great Jordie speechless.

Ending the sweet dances, there was Christoph Lindpointner. of Dallmayr Pralinenmanufaktur (Munich) who quoting Gennaro Esposito’s words “Italian cuisine is simple yet it is not easy” prepared two coffee pralines, five ingredients and two temperatures – hot, cold – to differentiate the taste. The summa of a philosophy illustrated by the maitre patissier of the historic pastry shop in Munich, a revolution after three centuries, focused on the use of fresh ingredients, a very accurate selection of the chocolate (only Valhrona) and a product life reduced from 8 weeks to 14 days. The clients, involved in the tasting, can tell the difference, indeed they can.