A cool taste of the Italian sweet life
With The Italian Bakery, you can easily become an authority on Italian dolci. Try our taster guide to the semifreddo!
Ever since it was first published, a little over seventy years ago, The Silver Spoon has been prized as one of the most important Italian cookbooks of all time. The people of the Italian peninsula are known for their dedication to good food, and The Silver Spoon records, preserves and offers up much of that exacting culinary knowledge,helping everyone from newly weds to senior nonnas and nonnos cook great food for themselves, their friends and family.
Our new publication, The Italian Bakery, extracts the sweetest parts of the original Silver Spoon, delivering, for the first time, just the dolci dishes from this revered cookbook. Laid out in simple, easy-to-follow text, and crisp, clear photography, the recipes are carefully annotated, indicating how long they take to make, which dietary regimes they fall within, and whether they’re easy, or difficult to create.
The section on semifreddos varies from easy to hard, though the overall concept is pretty easy to grasp. Though you might mistake them for conventional ice creams, they’re actually more like frozen puddings or mousses. The word translates literally as semi-frozen or half frozen, and The Italian Bakery says they’re perfect for summer evenings.
The chapter in The Italian Bakery guides cooks through the making of constituent parts, such as pâte à bombe (a kind of uncooked, meringue-like mixture that freezes really well) right up to more complicated dishes, such as mirror-glazed mango and raspberry hearts (top). The helpful texts also include a few pro tips, such as this one for that last recipe: “When making a mousse, always fold the lightest ingredient in last. Here the light whipped cream is folded in after the mango puree.”
Get this book, and you’ll soon master this and more. To order a copy of The Italian Bakery go here.