About...Strawberry and Red Pepper Gelato of Bar Della Darsena in Fiumicino (Rome), Italy
It's called "About...Strawberry and Red Pepper" and it recently won second place in the recent European Gelato Festival in Florence for its simple and frank refreshing flavors of red peppers and strawberries. Imagine a strawberry sorbet with a surprising gentle kick of sweet peppery taste. It doesn't overwhelm the strawberry, rather, its flavor wraps itself around the berry with a very light nuance of sapidity at the end. What else can I say? You have to go to the town of Fiumicino and have yourself a few scoops before the strawberry season ends.
Bar Della Darsena has been around for years fronting the port of Fiumicino. It's
a bar with a lot of tables and chairs which accommodate locals
and tourists. It's a place where people meet to have something like
coffee, cocktail, or gelato to cool down in the hot summer days in its
big open space. And then gelato maker Vincenzo Lenci came home last May 2017 with great news. He won first place (senior division) in the semi-finals of the Gelato Festival in Rome.
His gelato, About...Strawberry and Red Pepper was
classified as one of the fifteen finalists in the European Gelato
Festival that was to be held in Florence four months later. It's an accomplishment, not only for himself but shared also by the whole town. September 21st, the big day at the European Gelato Festival arrived and Vincenzo Lenci got the silver trophy!
A few weeks before the Gelato Festival, I visited
Vincenzo in his laboratory at the back of Bar Della Darsena. A jolly
person who has lived almost all his life in Fiumicino, married an
Englishwoman (thus the English name of his gelato) and focused his life
in making gelato, the grandeur of such an accomplishment awarded to him
was so cherished and I think well-deserved for the years of dedication
he has given to making gelato. He studied the proper approach to
gelatomaking, experimented, stayed with traditional flavors and perhaps
made an odd flavor or two over the years.
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| Left: Vincenzo Lenci (2nd Place); Middle: Massimiliano Scotti of Verolatte (1st Place); Right: Lodziarno Cukierno of Gastronomie Limoni Canteri 1952 (3rd Place) (Photo from Gelato Festival site) |
I watched him work systematically with two of his new
and bestselling summer gelato flavors: About...Strawberry and Red
Pepper, and Peach and Basil. I got to know this celebrated gelato maker more deeply as
he chopped the fresh basil that came from his own mother's garden, the
last ingredient he needed to add to the peach and basil sorbet. He spoke
about the process of making gelato, his philosophy, the importance of
following the seasons to get the best of the fresh ingredients, the excitement and pressure in the upcoming European Gelato Festival.
When I asked him about how About...Strawberry and Red
Pepper came to fruition, he said that the combination had been in his
mind for sometime until finally after his relentless harping, his
wife and staff told him to go for it. Which he did and got a surprising result that he never expected. He was chosen as one of the fifteen finalists of European Gelato Festival 2017 in Florence and he also won the gold medal for the Best Gelato in the Senior Category of the semi-finals in Rome. He made me try his
"strawberry and red pepper sushi", a fresh fruit version of the gelato
which was actually a hulled strawberry with a little wedge of red pepper
inserted in the middle. Being seasonal, the quality and sweetness of
the strawberries differ from zone to zone and Vincenzo bases the use of
his strawberries according to the right period.
He starts from Basilicata, the southern part of Italy for the sweet
early strawberries and procures them more northern in Piedmont then all
the way up to the Netherlands in the later period to get the best of the
ingredients.
For the rest of the gelato that Vincenzo makes, he stayed with the more traditional flavors including the naturally-blue colored gelato with spirulina, a blue-green algae that he uses to give that indigo hue to the vanilla gelato. With the shiny new silver trophy sitting next to the equally shiny gold medal, Fiumicino's own gelateria made a mark in the map for excellent gelato in the European level.
Bar Della Darsena
Viale Traiano, 133
00054 Fiumicino (RM), Italy
Open daily from 6 AM to 2 AM
Where to Eat in Fiumicino:
