Professional Foray #14: DC does gelato, and how: Dolcezza, Dupont Circle

DC does a few things right.  Museums.  Air quality.  Indian food, namely at Rasika, where I had quite possibly the best Indian meal I've ever had.  Chinese food, humor and politics are not its strengths.

Gelato, it turns out, is.  Dolcezza, of which there are three locations in the DC area, is some of the finest gelato I've tasted in America, on a par with Grom or Cones.  The location near Dupont is clean, mostly white, intimate and rustic, like the sophisticated little cafes that dot the historical town centers of the wealthy cities in northern Italy.  It's owned by an Argentine woman, Violetta Edelman, and her husband Rob Duncan, who source everything from local farmers.  You can read their Michael Pollan-esque odes to their farmer friends on their website.  Almost everyone gets described as "some of the nicest folks we know."

Irrespective of how kind the farmers are, and how much Violetta and Rob adore them, this is some spanking good gelato.  My friend Liz and I had the ginger cardamom pistachio, the pumpkin spice (with nutmet, allspice, clove, cinnamon and ginger), and the chocolate with ancho, chipotle and cinnamon.  The pistachio flavor was particularly unique, reminiscent of mann w' salwa, a cardamom-pistachio flavor I'd heretofore only eaten in the Middle East, where that combination is used often in nougat candies.  As in most cases, the addition of ginger made it even more delicious.  The pumpkin flavor features locally-grown Crookneck pumpkins, a sweet variety of squash they bake with spices before folding it into cream sourced from a Pennsylvania dairy.

I'm nearing my wit's end with the preciousness of local this and small farmer that (even though I prefer to shop, eat and generally live that way, I'm tired of talking and reading about it all the time), so I won't dwell further on how great all of these efforts are.  The important thing is taste, and this gelato tastes wonderful.  It's creamy and light on the tongue, goes down easy, and you don't need to drink a lot of water while you eat it, which is how you know if it's too rich or heavy.  I was able to go to dinner a half-hour later, and eat another giant Indian meal.  And if Dolcezza wasn't closed by the time we finished, I would have had another cone.  Dolcezza, 1705 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC, 202 299 9116, www.dolcezzagelato.com

Bespoke ice cream, attempt #1: Molasses gingersnap à la Moondog Ice Cream

In the "Bespoke ice cream" series, I will chronicle my endeavors to make the world's most delicious (to me) ice cream.  I confess that, if given the choice, I will generally err on the side of a lighter, icier ice cream - more milky than creamy, although I do love a kulfi every now and then when the occasion demands it. It may be because I drink such copious amounts of chai that I've grown accustomed to its particular mouthfeel.  My chai formula calls for part vanilla soymilk and part whole organic milk- the soymilk lets the spicy flavors come through while the whole milk gives it body.

On my first grocery store run, I came home from Whole Foods with a one-gallon jug of organic whole milk, a few pints of half-and-half, a box of vanilla soymilk, and a few cartons of heavy whipping cream.  I was going to make cookies and cream, my go-to flavor, first, so I bought some "natural" Oreo-style cookies, at which point I noticed a bag of "natural" gingersnaps on the shelf.  I flashed back to my early teens: long-boarding around Greenwich Village with my best friend Emma, cutting school to eat lobster rolls at Pearl Oyster Bar back when it only had one table and a few seats at the bar, and always, always stopping at Moondog Ice Cream on Bleecker Street for a little taste of their heaven.  One particular flavor that has never left me was the molasses gingersnap.  So simple, so...outlandishly...good.  I realized I hadn't had it in over a decade, whereas my last cookies and cream encounter was probably only hours old.  Then I waited 45 minutes to pay for my ingredients, enough time to read all the latest news as well as the most popular news with the NYT iPhone app.

I started with Christopher Kimball's basic two-quart recipe for vanilla from the Dessert Bible (I'm away at a wedding at the moment but I'll post it in full on Sunday night), but substituted one cup of soymilk for one of the cups of milk, and one cup of half-and-half for one of the cups of heavy cream.  I also upped the sugar by a tiny bit, which turned out to be a youthful error.  After refrigerating the mixture overnight, I poured half of it out into a large Pyrex, reserving the other quart for a cookies and cream adventure.

Into the Pyrex full of creamy vanilla custard base I drizzled organic blackstrap molasses, stirring and stirring til it had the same dark, coffee-colored hue I remembered from Moondog.  I also added ground ginger and cinnamon, to make it taste more like a gingersnap cookies.  As it churned, I crumbled the gingersnaps into a bowl, added some chopped crystallized ginger (to be safe) and dusted those items with more ground ginger and cinnamon.

I am happy to report that, even though my freezing canister wasn't quite cold enough, and the ice cream never quite froze to real ice cream, the taste is 100% right on, just like a delicious molasses cookie with chunks of chewy gingersnap and even more chunks of bracing candied ginger.  Each bite makes me feel 15 again.  After a day or two in the freezer, it became real hard ice cream, which I now scoop into organic sugar cones (I know, I know) or, even better, have every morning for breakfast as part of my "Ultimate Summer Cooler": iced chai, sweetened with a jaggery-honey syrup, topped with a few scoops of molasses gingersnap candied ginger ice cream.

FYI: I looked into what became of Moondog and according to a poster on Chowhound, the owner was "considering getting out of the ice cream biz" (is that like "having enough of the gang life"?).  I called a number they had listed in Brooklyn and got one of those fast busy signals that means the line is probably no longer working.  This is very sad, but I feel tremendously empowered having recreated his ice cream by myself. 

My friend Kate enjoys Bespoke ice cream, attempt #1.