As part of the Sugar Spirit project, I am starting to be more aware of types of sugar in other countries. When traveling to Italy recently, I picked up a couple of packets of sugar.
The "classico" sugar, according to my trip host, would be Italian-produced crystallized beet sugar.
The (slightly racist?) "tropical" sugar is labelled as "zucchero bruno di canna" or "brown sugar of cane," so it's like Sugar in the Raw but the grains are smaller.
Not a huge revelation but one data point that will hopefully be part of a large collection of others going forward.
The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.
Here are some random pictures and notes from my trip to Rome and the Amalfi Coast with Pallini Limoncello.
Rome is a very, very crowded city, especially around tourist attractions. On our second day there we had a guide who was amazing and knew all the ways around the lines. That's the only way to do it.
I had a gelato at San Crispino, supposedly the best in the world. I can't vouch for that, but my two flavors - whisky and honey- were delicious.
The view from the King Victor Emmanual II memorial is great.
(Look kids, it's the Vatican!)
The Colliseum is a lot bigger than I had imagined. I was thinking it was about three stories tall and could fit a couple thousand people. Nope. It's huge, you can see it from everywhere, and it sat 55,000 people.
(This is the view from my hotel room on the last night, the Hotel Palazzo Manfredi. Wowza.)
(Seating went all the way up to the top. The stage at the end used to cover the whole floor. The stuff below is where the animals and gladiators were kept between fights.)
We went to a bakery called Panella that makes old Roman-style bread once used for travelers. Naturally, they were out of it on the day we went.
Fried artichokes are a thing in Rome. We had them a few times.
The Pantheon is an architectural marvel. This and other ancient temples only survive today because they ripped out all the pagan stuff and replaced it with Christian stuff. Good thing gods are interchangeable.
(At night, outside.)
(Inside, daytime. There is a hole in the roof. This acts as a sundial as well.)
We stopped for an espresso nearby at Eustachio, again supposedly one of Rome's best. Their trick is to use some sort of sugar foam. Maybe they run it through the milk steamer.
Pallini also used to make a fernet!
I bought a Crodino on the Amalfi Coast. It tastes like a non-alcoholic Campari & Soda. Delicious!
I also bought something called China Martini, which I'm guessing is a sweet vermouth derivative using quinine.
And speaking of bitter, while at a restaurant called Sol De Riso, I tasted all the amari on the menu that I previously hadn't tried.
Amaro de Capo - a locally made amaro with notes of quinine, orange, and saffron. Pretty good.
Radis - Tastes like cola, quinine, orange. You could imagine mixing it with soda water to make a cola.
Don Baioro - Very Chrismassy. Tastes of prune/raisin, clove, molasses, and coffee.
Petrus - Perfumy yet incredibly bitter. We took pictures of everyone's expression while tasting it. Here was mine.
I am one lucky son-of-a-gun. This September I visited Rome and the Amalfi Coast with PalliniLimoncello. Though we began the trip in Rome and went to the Amalfi Coast later, I'll explain the process of making limoncello in the proper order.
The Lemons of the Amalfi Coast
The lemons for Pallini are sfusato ("elongated") lemons, so-named for their tapered shape. They are also sometimes called feminine lemons because each side looks like a nipple. These are slightly different from Sorrento lemons that are more football-shaped.
These lemons are low in acid; very sweet. In fact we had an unsweetened lemonade made with them. It was tart, but still drinkable. Even the pith isn't that bitter- we had a 'salad' made with these lemons soaked in balsamic vinegar and salt - and you could eat the whole thing - fruit, pith, and rind.
But for limoncello purposes, they're interested in the skin of the lemons only. The skins of sfusato lemons are highly aromatic and rich in essential oils.
These lemons grow along the Amalfi Coast in a most improbable way. Actually, the whole coast doesn't make much sense - it is all incredibly steep and rocky, with sharp inclines from the mountains down to the ocean. Picture the drive along Highway 1 in California if people had build houses all the way down to the ocean.
Carved into the cliffs are terraced gardens on which they grow lemons, along with eggplants, grapes, tomatoes, olives, and everything else you can think of. It's a surprisingly productive area given that the base is just rocks.
But the cliff-side growing arrangement means lots and lots of sunshine for these plants. The lemons grow so big and so productively that if these were just normal trees growing on their own, the branches would almost surely snap beneath the weight of the fruit.
Thus the farmers have developed a system to support the lemon tree branches, a pergola made of chestnut wood. This forms a lemon tree umbrella of sorts, with hundreds of huge lemons dangling from above.
(Bonus cat picture!)
The terraced lemon groves present some difficulties in harvesting, as you'd imagine. The lemons are all picked by hand as they ripen, then must be carried uphill to the next road that can be pretty far when you've got a heavy crate of lemons on your back.
Processing Lemons
After the lemons are harvested, they're transported by truck along the windy (and terrifying to those of us scared of heights) road to the processing center. We visited the one Pallini uses: CastierAgrumi De Riso.
When the lemons come in to the factory, they are first washed and then sorted. The very best lemons are sold in crates to stores and restaurants. The rest are peeled to make limoncello.
To do this, they use a machine that peels two lemons at a time. It is hand-loaded and seems to frequently jam - no wonder with sticky, oily peels involved. In this video, you can see the machine working.
The peels that come out are then vacuum-sealed into bags and sent to Pallini to use.
Making Limoncello
Pallini's distillery (it's not actually a distillery as they don't distill there but a rectification plant; still I'll call it a distillery for the sake of clarity) is where they make limoncello from the lemon peels.
Though once there were 30 distilleries in Rome, Pallini is the only one left. Originally, the distillery was located a few hundred yards from the Pantheon in central Rome but now it is in an industrial park-type area a good 30-40 minutes drive from the city center.
To make the limoncello, first they soak the peels in high-proof alcohol (I think around 96%) to extract their flavor. Though they didn't tell us the exact time, I inferred the extraction takes less than a couple of days.
Then they blend this concentrated lemon alcohol with more neutral alcohol (that is distilled from Italian sugar beet molasses), water, and a sugar syrup (made from crystallized sugar beet sugar). To make the flavor pop, they also add essential oils from the same lemons.
Somewhere in the process, they homogenize the ingredients so they retain a fresh flavor and do not separate or oxidize. We tasted several other brands of limoncello and most had a slightly musty flavor of oxidation compared to Pallini.
Other Products
Pallini also makes a Raspicello (useful as a Chambord substitute, or perhaps in a Bramble?) and a Peachcello (for the Bellini). These are actually made by distilling the berries and peaches, and adding fruit juice or fresh berries back in at bottling time. The production seemed pretty interesting but we didn't go into it in detail.
Pallini makes around 150 products, which you'd never guess given the size of the distillery. The most famous one, however, is SambucaRomana. They created this brand but sold it to Diageo in the 1980s. They still produce it for Diageo though. It's actually a pretty interesting product on its own; a blend of distillates from three kinds of anise, elderflower, angelica, and other herbs and spices.
Anyway, that's it for my Pallini trip. Limoncello is an incredibly straight-forward liqueur made from very special lemons grown in an absolutely stunning place.
When I was in Florence with Bombay Sapphire, we had an education session by Luca Picchi. Picchi has taken it upon himself to study the history of the Negroni cocktail and the man who inspired its creation.
He published a book, "Sulle Tracce Del Conte" about the life of Cammillo Negroni. The book has been translated into English and may be available at Tales of the Cocktail this year (Picchi will be there) if they settle some international copyright issues.
According to Picchi, Negroni was an Italian playboy who fathered an illegitimate child and decided it was best to skedaddle. He moved to the United States and became a big cattle rancher near Saskatchewan, Canada.
He moved back to Italy in 1912, and wasn't welcome in Florence initially,but soon enough he was frequenting the bars of the city.
It was at Cafe Casoni where the drink bearing his name was invented. Negroni would frequent the place and asked for something stronger than his usual Americano. The bartender replaced the soda water with gin and the drink was born.
Currently, Picchi works at Caffe Rivoire and I stopped in for a drink. (If I remember correctly, Casoni and Rivoire had the same owners, and now Casoni is a store owned by Roberto Cavalli, so Rivoire is considered the inheritor of the Negroni legacy.)
Living in San Francisco, I thought that all Negronis were made the way they make them here- stirred, served up, and garnished with an orange or lemon twist. Not so!
This is not the case in Italy, where Negronis are always made on the rocks and with an orange slice (rather than peel) garnish. I stopped in to Rivoire for a Negroni (or two) from Picchi, and on a hot day on Florence it was delicious.
At the bar, they have a plaque dedicated to the Negroni. I think it may be the same plaque that was once at Casoni.
I popped the text into Google translate and this is what it says, not revealing much.
In mid-twenties, these walls driven by imaginative delicacies. Count Camillo Negroni gin to add some Americano who came to drink with friends everyday. Count Camillo thus cause the accidental invention of the Negroni and its spread in the elegant world of the time. it was unique sir deserve as much gratitude and memory availability of dark unaware Scarselli first mixer [Scarselli was the bartender who made the drink for Negroni.] and the consistency of coffee in Giacosa keep alive memory of the event along with the current owners brothers bardelli.
If any of you Italian speakers would care to offer a better translation I would appreciate it.
So, if you happen to be traveling to Florence any time soon, I recommend that you stop in to the Caffe Rivoire to have a Negroni from Luca Picchi.
In May I visited Italy to learn more about the botanicals used in Bombay Sapphire. From Tuscany they get both the juniper berries and orris used in the gin.
In the rolling hills of Tuscany at high elevations where there are few trees and many wildflowers are found the juniper bushes.
They're kind of ugly, sprawling little bushes.
They're full of clusters of berries- more than I'd expect. We were there during the off season, so not many are the blue color of ripe berries.
Juniper is harvested by hand, using wide round baskets and short sticks.
They stick the baskets beneath a branch and whack it with the stick so that the blue, ripe berries fall off but the green, unripe ones do not.
Some of the needles stick to the berries. Any green ones that get in are sorted out later.
I tried it, but wasn't very good at it.
But then again, there weren't actually any ripe berries to harvest at this time of year.
Last week I went to Tuscany with Bombay Sapphire to see a demonstration of juniper berry harvesting. I'll try to post more information in a little bit, but for now here's how they do it:
Using a flat, round basket and a short hard stick, they whack the juniper bush branches so that the berries fall off. They want only the blue, ripe berries and not the green, unripe ones that will be ready the following year. Thus they must hit the bush with a certain force that removes one ripeness of berry and not the other.
Camper English is a cocktails and spirits writer for publications including the SF Chronicle, Details.com, Fine Cooking, CLASS Magazine, and many more. Learn about Camper and Alcademics, or read clips of his published work.
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