Ricardo’s made what amounts to its first custom order, when old gym friend Dennis Kukulsky and his partner Suzanne Buchanan invited me and EMG over for a dinner and I offered to make a gelato they’d choose. Dennis quickly chose lemon and left the other up to me. It’s summer so it had to be a fresh fruit and the choice was raspberry sorbet – and to add an interesting note – mint from our own garden.

Lemon is rather labour-intensive. Zest from five lemons takes about a half hour and wears out the hand quickly; then a cup of juice from those lemons, steep the zest in the milk, cream, and sugar for a half hour or so, strain, add the lemon juice and cool. It’s a fantastic flavour. But use less sugar than any recipe calls for. Most sorbets are fairly easy to make, just simple syrup (sugar and water) and fresh fruit. In raspberry’s case, one has to decide between seeds or no seeds; some gelateria like Dolce Gelato leave them in. They do add flavour but for guests and edibility, I suggest taking them out by pressing the juice through a sieve. That works quite well.

The mint from our garden, steeped in the simple syrup for 30 minutes, adds a grassy overtone that works very well with the tart/sweet raspberry.  In any case, both flavours were phenomenal, and I left behind the canisters with the Ricardo’s Gelato labels so for the first time they are in someone else’s freezer, spreading the word. As for the name Buchanan, it made me laugh; James Buchanan, the 15^th U.S. president, just before Lincoln, is often considered the nation’s worst, as he did little to prevent the U.S. Civil War. His name now turns up in dialogue referring to the Orange Menace: “Now there’s someone even lower on the worst president’s list than Buchanan.” Or, as some other wit added, there has to be a new subbasement for the indicted former Guy.

As it’s cherry season, I was looking for something to do with the beautiful, prevalent sweet Washington State cherries now in the markets. I now have a most effective cherry pitter so it’s much easier to prepare the fruit.

As a supremo Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia fan, I’ve enjoyed the indulgent Cherry Garcia Ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavour. It’s got too much butterfat and Ricardo’s only makes gelato so I reasoned what if I adapted the recipe for gelato? It’s complicated. There are three steps with the cherries: simmering and steeping one part for their juice, saving whole cherries and chopping the rest and then adding chocolate chips.

I like when a flavour is complicated; it’s more fun even though one of my best flavours, dark chocolate sorbet, one of my best, is the easiest and least complicated, along with espresso (which I combined with cocoa powder and chocolate chips recently to make a caffé mocha). (I’m going to ditch the chocolate next time and just add chips to the espresso; that’ll be fantastic).

The Cherry Garcia had mixed results; I used the Sicilian base, with no egg yolks, and it produced a hard texture, masking some of the flavour. Egg yolks next time. Even so, I liked it, even if EMG did not as much, pronouncing it ‘tasteless.’ At least LegallyT enjoyed it.

The Niagara peaches are in, too, very sweet. I made a peach gelato with little peach pieces in it, a minor success. Then I was walking down Eglinton West, checking out what Hotel Gelato was up to. Dan Hoffman said roasted Ontario corn would soon be on the menu and I wanted to try that and so I popped in and noticed that Niagara peach sorbet was there too.

Both were triumphs; the corn with enough fresh from the cob flavour, along with the requisite sweetness and roasty, toasty feeling. And the sorbet showed off the peaches much better than the gelato version which masked in part the fresh picked perfume. This I have to try. Strawberries are also in season, along with wild blueberries; HowardF my @jrotty father-in-law, or machatunim in the Yiddish, the peerless language, expressed astonishment that I had become a gelatiera so I asked him what his fave flavour was and the answer was strawberry so I had to whip up a batch of fragola, which I like immensely too. Here was kind of to say, who commented, “Mmmmm good…excellent.”