Good coffee.”īut you don’t even need to use coffee in your affogato. The chef, Edmundo Garzón, told me that he serves 50 to 60 of these a week. Pisticci, a trattoria in Morningside Heights in Manhattan, drowns a tartufo - a bombe made with vanilla and chocolate ice creams with a Maraschino cherry in the middle, all encased in a hard chocolate shell - in espresso. Pistachio is a welcome change from the unrolling highway of routine.
Dulce de leche would be wonderful, with its caramelized milkiness, as would the bitterness of cherry amaretto. Fior di latte and crema are most popular in Italy, though vanilla and chocolate are also excellent. Even a bad one can be very good, but a very good one can change your life.Īffogato means “drowned” in Italian, and you can drown just about any ice cream. How the ice cream and coffee coalesced into the affogato remains a mystery. Single-shot espresso didn’t come into the picture until the turn of the 20th century, when the Milanese inventor Luigi Bezzera patented a machine that forced, or expressed, hot steam through ground coffee beans. We can find evidence of modern gelato, made with milk, a century later. The magic of an affogato is that even a bad one can be very good, but a very good one can change your life.Īffogato al caffè, or gelato drowned in coffee, is “one of Italy’s most delectable modern dishes,” Anna Del Conte writes in her authoritative book “Gastronomy of Italy.” Though the affogato’s origins are largely unknown, the fashion of drinking wine with snow or ice took off in 16th-century Italy.
The rewards are twofold: The coffee gives you energy, and the ice cream makes you happy.īut nothing beats a properly made affogato, which is to say some supercold gelato with a shot or two of hot espresso. Eat this in a parked car before the ice cream melts and the coffee cools, as I did recently on Interstate 81 heading south. Go to any fast-food restaurant that serves ice cream and coffee (most do), order both and mix. In 1960, when John Steinbeck hit the road for the cross-country adventure that would become “Travels With Charley,” he wrote that he often stopped for coffee, not because he wanted it “but for a rest and a change from the unrolling highway.” I, too, turn to coffee on long stretches of boring road, but for me, one addition is essential: vanilla soft serve, for a concoction I like to call an affogato Americano.
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