Talenti - Sea Salt Caramel

   As promised, here is the second of my Talenti flavor reviews, albeit delayed.

   Sea Salt. That is what caught my eye with this one. It is a BIG thing these days if you use sea salt in anything, even more so if you use it in a dessert. But wait. Salt in something sweet? Yes. Adding a touch of salt, especially high quality salt like sea salt, will enhance the natural sweetness of the dessert. If you say 'Made with sea salt' on your ice cream description, page, label, whatever, then people will flock to it "like the salmon of Capestrano".

   As with the previous Talenti flavor, this one was exceptionally smooth. I have never had a store-bought ice cream (gelato) with this kind of quality and texture. Cuts like butter. (I have to test that guar gum out for myself to see if it will work for me)

   The caramel base was a bit like sticking your nose into an oven that has charred food droppings lying in the bottom. It tasted like burnt caramel. That should be saved for the creme brulees of the dessert world. Yuck. Now, this ice cream was not quite that bad, but it did have hints of smoke. But you might ask, 'That's what caramel is, isn't it? Burnt stuff." No. It is burnt sugar, but you can burn caramel too. This is done by allowing the sugar to burn, making an amber caramel; then letting that caramel sit in the pan even longer until it too becomes burnt and a deeper brown color. That is when the taste becomes drastically different.
   The salt did add a great flavor to the caramel though. It was the saving grace. I am a huge fan of adding salt into my ice creams whenever I can. I think ice creams today are far too sweet, so I counter balance all mine with a touch of salt (a little more than a touch in my flavor 'Roasted Honey Nut'). The initial notes are of sweet, and partially burnt, caramel, but then the saltiness flows in like the great flood of Noah's day. Salt is where it is at.

   Ok. I thought the ice cream stopped there. No, sir. Unlabeled and unseen, these dark squares appear in my scoop. I checked the label again. 'Sea Salt Caramel'. Alright, then what is this?

   That, my friend, is a chocolate truffle. Very tasty little devils, I might add. They too had a touch of sea salt, and it worked marvelously with the dark chocolate. Sweet and salty: the greatest combo since peanuts and butter...
   Peanut butter.
   What I mean is, they were good. But only by themselves. The flavors clashed horrifically. The flavor of the salty caramel was powerful and potent. The salty chocolate truffles were equally powerful, though on a smaller scale. This gave rise to a epic war inside the mouth. A battle for top taste. As a result, I was the one wounded, and confused about which taste I wanted. I had no other choice than to take them together, which led to a re-battle!
   The caramel should have been the only thing in there. There was no need for them to add those chocolate truffle squares. That pushed this flavor over the top, and flew me over the cuckoo's nest.

 

  So, naturally, I crushed up some Oreo cookies for a little more action (expelling the white stuff). Talenti gelato is so incredibly smooth that is became obnoxious. I had to do something to balance it. CRUNCH. Ice creams are made to have crunchiness in them. Oreos are perfectly crunchy. Caramel and Oreo? Yeah, much better.

Thanks for reading. I now have another Talenti flavor in the freezer, so watch out for it.

-Reese O'Shirey, Esq.

P.S. Can anyone name the movie I quoted at the end of the first real paragraph?

Flavor Review: Talenti - Cappuccino

   This week found me in foreign worlds. The world of gelato. Gelato is becoming quite a trendy thing in America these days because it is Italian and cool and new. It is actually not new. In fact gelato has been around much longer than our ice cream. Gelato is just the Italian word for ice cream. So, intrinsically the two are not so different.

   Some of the ingredients used to make gelato differ from those of ice cream, and the amounts they are used in also differs. Guar gum? What the devil is that? Not wholly sure, but I will wager it is used as a stabilizer that prevents it from freezing solid, so that it is smoothly scoopable.  It's possible that it also acts as an emulsifier. Emulsifiers, or thickening agents, vary from brand to brand, and it is not surprising to see that they vary in gelato as well. Eggs are the most commonly used emulsifiers, and, as you can see, Talenti uses them too. Their gelato is also less fattening, lighter I should say, than the other leading brands. They must use skim milk, and other low-fat ingredients.

   I have often seen the sumptuous pint containers of Talenti resting in isolation behind the freezer doors in Publix, but have never been able to scrape up the extra cash needed to purchase one. Their price tag usually bests that of Ben & Jerry's and Haagen Dazs by about $1.40, thus turning me always toward the later two choices. But, this time Publix had it in their parsimonious hearts to discount them. I had to do a double take when I made my routine pass through the ice cream aisle. Two for $7.00? That's $3.50 a piece! After checking to see if my algebra was correct, I hesitated no longer, and grabbed the tastiest looking two of the select few flavors offered at our Tuscaloosa branch (which just stocked B&J 'Peanut Brittle' and 'Late Night Snack' two weeks ago.......over a year late!).
   Feeling thrifty, I left, and consumed them...mostly for your benefit, the reader, so that you can fear the foreign and strange woods of gelato no longer. It is safe.

   My first review is on the first flavor I tested, Cappuccino. The thing that burned its impression into my mind was its consistency and texture. After taking out of the freezer where it had set for a day, my spoon cut through it like a knife through butter (attributed to those unknown ingredients like the guar gum). That is the power of gelato. Its smooth creaminess is what trumps our native ice creams. In this area, I have yet to find a commercial brand that matches Talenti.
   My first bite made me feel like I was walking through a library with a Starbucks over in the corner where little thin guys with beards are nestled with their burnt coffees and laptops and trend-fitting glasses, trying to fit the social standard of their aspiring "group" by writing poetry and looking somber. It was odd, and it took several blinks to let my mind know that I was, in fact, still in my dusty apartment and that I did not have a beard (but my glasses were sitting on top of my book shelf).
   It was the best commercially produced coffee ice cream I have tasted. It beat Ben & Jerry's easily. I could not distinguish the notes of chocolate or coffee alone. It was so well blended together that they arrived at the taste buds as one, inseparable flavor. That is how the taste of Cappuccino should be. But my complaint is this: it was too espresso-y. Though the blend was smooth, it tasted like burnt coffee grounds, and that leaves the off-putting picture in my head of a soggy heap of grounds sitting in that white paper thing in the top of a coffee maker. Not my kind of flavor. The flavor I strive to emulate is that of true brewed coffee straight from the beans. It even says espresso here on their webpage. They admit it. Nay, the real way to create a coffee flavor is to use the actual beans, and the flavor they contain by seeping them into hot milk and cream.
   A good addition to the base were the dark chocolate shavings scattered throughout. They provided a texture difference, when one grows numb to the smooth gelato, and longs for a crunch or a crisp. But they were only slightly better than if they had thrown in Hershey's chocolate chips. They had good taste, but there still lingered that waxy chocolate crap found when cheaply manufactured chocolates are frozen.

   No doubt that Talenti is classy ice cream, and it is better crafted than Ben & Jerry's. On the back of the pint they make the point that it is craft ice cream: "Crafted by Talenti". But they are of a different mold. Talenti strives for that Old Europe style gelato, where the flavors, in their simplicity, get at the real ingredients instead of slapping you in the face with something new in every bite like B&J does. There is nothing wrong with harnessing true flavors, but one does grow bored of the repetition and vapidity experienced near the end of a pint of plain ice cream.

   Look for my next post on the second of my Talenti flavors.

Reese O'Shirey, Esq.