Panna cotta alle fragole
My Summer sweet tooth and I have a long and (sugared) history, one that can be divided in to various chapters, if you will. Ehem:
As a little gal — 6 or 7 years old or so, a future foodie— my favorite season was characterized by all-American s’mores, that over-the-top, summer-time confection comprised of two crunchy Graham crackers filled with a square of softly melting Hershey’s milk chocolate and a toasted marshmallow, gooey on the inside and blistered on the outside. In hindsight, it was one of the first “recipes” that I learned to prepare.
When I was a little older — a uniformed fourth grader at Our Lady of Mercy in East Greenwich, Rhode Island — there was nothing quite like escaping the hot, stuffy classroom and heading to Hilltop Creamery after a long day at school. More ice cream stand than shop, Hilltop served (or rather serves — the place is eternal) everything from hot fudge sundaes to oreo milkshakes. My order was nearly always the same: vanilla soft serve with toasted coconut topping on a sugar, (never wafer!) cone.
Fast forward: on my 17th birthday, I got a — drumroll! — ice cream maker, which made my (newly) discovered hobby of cooking and baking even more exciting. I began experimenting with making not only my own ice cream but also gelato (a treat I had sampled during my first trip to Italy a few years before). My repertoire grew to include everything from simple chocolate gelato to flashier brownie-cookie dough ice cream, and the summer of 2006 will always be remembered by my (lucky) family as the Summer of the Ice Cream Maker.
When I moved to Italy some years later, I discovered granita at a gelateria not far from my apartment. A tall plastic cup full of what seemed to be a mountain of strawberry ice (somewhere in between a sorbet and a slushie) topped off with a generous dollop of whipped cream caught my eye one day as it was handed over to a fellow customer. It was love at first sight — the granita, not the customer — and my new go-to when I was craving something sweet on a sweltering day. Indeed: I can’t wait to eat this Sicilian treat when I head to Palermo next month (!!!)
Italy goes crazy for watermelon in the summer, and it wasn’t long before I caught on, too. In Rome you can find stands on the street selling whole watermelons, watermelon by the slice, and individual cups of watermelon for only a few euros, and I can’t get enough. Long story short, I truly believe watermelon — anguria in Italian, or cocomero, as it’s known in the capital — is the most perfect of all summer foods, light and refreshing yet still filling, a sweet exclamation point in an infernally hot day.
And now, you might be wondering? What does the sweet tooth of a 30-something year old food blogger crave when the temperatures rise and turning on the oven is out of the question?!
The answer: panna cotta, a classic Italian dolce that requires minimal effort and zero use of the oven, and when enjoyed straight out of the fridge, is cold, refreshing, and, a joy to eat. So: a good panna cotta is softly wobbly, perfectly smooth, and just sweet enough, miles away from the gummy, cloying, perplexingly jiggly ones you might find in a restaurant (it’s unfortunately common here even in Italy). This season I’ve experimented with a divine pistachio panna cotta, an unabashedly chocolate-y one, and today’s classic vanilla panna cotta with strawberries — think of this as strawberries and cream, revisited — which is truly the pinnacle of panna cotta perfection, if I don’t say so myself.
And asking for a friend here, but: this has fruit in it, which technically means it would be okay for breakfast, right guys?!
A couple of notes: When serving your panna cotta, you can either unmold them or just leave them in their serving dish. If you want to unmold them, run the serving dish under hot water very briefly and then flip them on to a plate. Feel free to substitute pitted cherries for the strawberries in the sauce if you’d want.
Looking for other panna cotta recipes or other no-bake desserts? Click here.
Looking for other summer desserts? Click here.
PANNA COTTA ALLE FRAGOLE
Makes 6 panna cotta.
Ingredients for the panna cotta:
2 gelatine sheets (precisely 8 grams or roughly 1/4 ounce)
2 3/4 cup (650mL) heavy cream
1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons (120 grams) sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 large pieces of lemon peel (removed from the lemon with a potato peeler)
Ingredients for the strawberry sauce:
5 tablespoons (62 grams) sugar
A little over 1lb (500 grams) hulled strawberries, hulled and quartered
1 tablespoon (15mL) lemon juice
Directions:
Fill a bowl with cold water and add the gelatin sheets; set them aside to soften for 15 minutes. In the meantime, in a small saucepan over medium-low heat, combine the cream, sugar, lemon peel and vanilla, and bring to a simmer. Let the cream mixture simmer for 10 or so minutes and take it off the heat. Remove the gelatin from the water and squeeze it dry (it may break into small pieces, this is fine) and add it to the cream mixture. Stir well, until the gelatin dissolves completely (if it doesn’t, warm the whole mix a little again and whisk briefly over low heat). Divide the cream mixture into ramekins or serving dishes of your choice. Chill in the fridge until set, around 5 hours.
In the meantime, make the strawberry sauce. Combine the strawberries, sugar, and lemon juice in a pan over medium-low heat. Bring the sauce to a boil, and then lower the heat and simmer for 20 or so minutes, or until the sauce is thickened and the strawberries have cooked down. Let cool and then spoon over your panna cotta.
