“What can I get you?” The waiter smiled with the practiced closed lips of a hundred such questions. It was the breakfast rush at the Belmond Sant’Andrea in Taormina during the peak summer season in Sicily. Behind him the sun cast its relentless rays across the azure expanse of the Mediterranean. Somewhere behind me, Mt. Etna puffed its volcanic plume into the cloudless sky. I was sweating and it wasn’t even 10 am.
“I’ll have a…” I hesitated, suddenly self-conscious, “…coffee granita.”
If it was odd to be ordering a dessert for breakfast, the waiter didn’t show it. “With brioche?”
“Sì.” I quickly answered this time, emboldened. Of course, it wasn’t weird to be eating icy, sweetened coffee for breakfast. In Sicily this was breakfast. Naturally.
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It was 2022, the summer of the great escape, where two years of pent-up travel ambitions unleashed on Europe a torrent of American tourists. I was one of them. Having been separated from travel and our families, my husband and I joined the masses with my parents and our two-year old for an epic Italian adventure, begun in sweltering Renaissance Florence and ending on the sunbaked beaches of Sicily.
As sure as the crowds of fellow tourists always seemed to be on hand, the temperature never dropped to a comfortable level. To cool down, there were oceans and lakes, but there was also a lot of gelato. And by the time we got to Sicily, there was granita.
Granita, a dairy-free frozen dessert, bears more in common with shaved ice than it does its better-known cousin, gelato. With a history that some reports date back 4000 years, granita most certainly owes its origin to year-round access to ice, via the snow brought down from the slopes of Mount Etna. Beginning in the 9th century, Arab rulers brought sugar and fruit juices to the mix creating an elite luxury they called “sherbet”. With the invention ice boxes, the dish continued to evolve eventually using a combination of sweetened fruit juices, nut milks and coffee, frozen with loose crystals then scooped or shaved into a sweet, slushy pile. Today, served with a brioche roll, this is perhaps the ultimate breakfast for a sweltering island climate.
As a recent article in The New York Times reminded us, even as us tourists enjoy the turquoise waters and gelatos of southern Europe, drought combined with the heat this year is having disastrous effects on agriculture and the people who live and work year-round in places like Sicily. With a history of human inhabitation that has endured 14,000 years and multiple civilizations from the Greeks to the Visigoths to the Byzantine Empire, this island has learned how to endure much more than heat and drought. While temperatures across much of the Northern Hemisphere bake us all, granita might be just the thing to cool down.
One hallmark of Sicilian granita is the use of local ingredients: mellow lemons, bitter almonds, dark and sticky mulberries, intense pistachios. Adapting it for your locale, you would do well to find a fruit or nut that best showcases where you are. In California, I’m making it two ways this summer. The first is a kids’ delight: sweet, seedless watermelon with just a touch of added sugar and balanced with a squeeze of lime. The second, is a creamy alternative to dairy with homemade almond milk dressed up with honey and vanilla.
Call it breakfast. Call it dessert. Whatever the time of day, when you need a sweet, cool treat, there is nothing quite like it. And if someone asks you if you’d like to have a granita, the answer it always sì.
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Almond (Mandorla) Granita
Serves 6
1 cup raw almonds, soaked in water overnight (or 2 hours in boiling water)
5 cups filtered water
1 T. honey
2 tsp. vanilla
¼ tsp salt
Place all ingredients in a blender. Blend on medium speed for a full 2 minutes to extract maximum liquid, creating almond milk. Place a double thickness of cheese cloth over a fine mesh strainer placed over a medium bowl. Slowly, pour almond milk through the cheesecloth lined strainer. When all liquid has been poured, gather up the edged of the cheesecloth and twist to extract and remaining liquid. Discard solids. Pour strained almond milk into a shallow glass or ceramic pan.
Cover and place pan in the freezer. Every 30 minutes for 2 hours, run the tines of a fork through the juice to break up ice crystals. You can keep this up until it reaches a slushy consistency, or freeze solid then ready to eat, bring the pan out 20 – 30 minutes before serving to loosen. Scrape with a fork to shave crystals. Mound into a dessert cup and serve with a soft brioche roll, like the Sicilians do for breakfast, or an almond tuille for a grown up dessert.
Watermelon Granita
Serves 6
6 cups cubed, seedless watermelon
2 T. lime or lemon juice
2 T. sugar or more to taste
Place all ingredients in a blender. Strain through fine mesh metal sieve into a shallow glass or ceramic pan.
Cover and place pan in the freezer. Every 30 minutes for 2 hours, run the tines of a fork through the juice to break up ice crystals. You can keep this up until it reaches a slushy consistency. Or, freeze solid, then when ready to eat, bring the pan out 30 minutes before serving to loosen. Scrape with a fork to shave crystals. Mound into a dessert cup and serve with a mint sprig and (optional).
To Drink…
Another New York Times nod, I was delighted to read Eric Asimov’s piece this week on “10 Wines from California, $20 to $40”. Perhaps it was reading about the breadth of quality small production affordable wines he was recommending that inspired me to finally pop my head into Little Victory, a newish wine shop in Encinitas, CA. It must have been fate as I nearly laughed aloud seeing multiple wines from that Asimov article represented on the shelves of this tightly curated shop.
After a nice chat with the owner, Jeremy Simpson, I walked away with several bottles to try out this week. The wine selection in the shop falls under that broad category “natural wine” but Jeremy assured me that his focus is on wines that taste good, first and foremost, they just happen to have minimal intervention, as the natural wine enthusiasts like to say.
I’m happy to share the first bottle I opened, Margins Chenin Blanc 2023, was a surprise and a delight. As a lover of the fruit and balanced acidity, as well as versatile food pairings of great Chenin Blanc, I was eager to taste this. I can say it tastes like no other Chenin I’ve had. That’s not a bad thing. From the Wilson Vineyard in Clarksburg, California, the warm days of the Sacramento Delta are balanced with nightly temperature drops coming off the San Francisco Bay, allowing the fruit to retain a crisp acidity. Fermenting with the skins gives the finished wine a golden hue and lovely texture. Winemaker Megan Bell named this label for her commitment to making wine with grapes often overlooked in our Chardonnay and Cab heavy state. Let’s hope with winemakers like her, along with champions like Little Victory and The Times, these wines don’t stay on the margins for too long.
Margins Chenin Blanc, Wilson Vineyard, Clarksburg, CA 2023, from $27 at Little Victory in Encinitas, CA
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