Traditional sweets are as important as gastronomic cultures.
I like to close my eyes and listen. I like food, and those who create it, to speak to me through my senses. And I have chosen Sal de Riso to beguile my senses with his Lemon Delight. I closed my eyes yes, to be led by his words into one of the world's best-known and best-loved desserts.
Salvatore, let's pretend that I have never eaten your Delight; now I close my eyes and you let me taste it through your story...
The lemon delight was born from an indelible memory. My mother used to make me drink fresh milk with lemon peel infused in the morning. It was my daily drink, and yes, certainly both profiterole and delizia were born from this memory of mine: the scent of lemon, the Amalfi lemonsuntreated, with their essential oils, which were released when my mum cut them and then put the peel in milk. I made this cake for the first time in 1989: a very light sponge cake, with two extra egg yolks to make it even lighter, and vanilla berries. This whipped sponge cake is poured with a sac à poche onto sheets of baking paper, as if they were little Vesuvius, little light mountains, and then baked in the oven. I two pieces of sponge cake are filled with a cream made from lemon juice and lemon peel. Lemon juice is cooked with egg yolk, sugar, an addition of fresh butter and then the emulsion, custard and whipped cream. Ah, of course there is no lack of a touch of limoncello, which gives the Delizia an even crisper, cooler tone. Once filled, the sponge cake is lightly soaked, left to rest in the fridge for a few hours and then glazed with an icing made of lemon cream, custard and whipped cream. The whipped cream is then diluted with fresh milk and the Delizia is completely immersed in this sauce and presented on a beautiful ceramic tray.
It is a soft cake, rich in flavour: cream, lemon peel. The outside of the Delizia is fragrant and rich in essential oils. To top it all off, a tuft of cream and
zest.
This is the dessert that all tourists, from all parts of the globe, go to taste when they come to the Costiera. Because Salvatore is the one, Sal De Risoone of the confectioners best-loved Italians in the world. A positive and smiling man, as sunny as those unique and fragrant Amalfi lemons that marked his childhood: an aroma that turned into passion.
And if everyone knows that the confectionery in Minori is the house where Salvatore grew up, there is a story that not everyone knows, the story of Grandpa Antonio's granita and the saying
of yesteryear among the inhabitants of the City of Taste (Minori is nicknamed after this and Salvatore put his hand in it!). "Let's go to Lillina's for a slushie!".
"A few years ago -says Sal De Riso -, when one of two sisters had no children and maybe the other had eight, one of these children was entrusted to the aunt. Here, my father at the age of 10 went to live with his aunt. Aunt Carolina, called Lillina, had a Sali e Tabacchi where they sold a bit of everything. You could drink coffee on the coals made with the Neapolitan machine, you could buy sweets, loose coffee, bicarbonate, citrate, spices, they even sold loose tobacco. And, among many other things, during the summer they prepared and sold lemon granita.
It was a recipe invented by Aunt Lillina, who later taught it to my father. It was prepared with grated lemon peels with a piece of glass. Basically, you would take a piece of glass and let it grate over the Amalfi lemon and this wonderful peel with all the essential oils would fall out. The peel was placed in water and sugar and left to infuse for a few hours, after which the lemons were squeezed and the lemon juice and pulp were added to the water; it was left to macerate for a while and then filtered.
This product was made both 'a granita' and 'a sorbet' and was the only product that aunt and dad made as ice cream.
It became famous all over the Coast: first known as Lillina's granita, then as Nonno Antonio's, because later Papa became Grandpa..."
That slush is still in the Sal de Riso's bistro menumade just as it was then (except for the piece of glass, replaced by an ordinary grater): eight lemons for every litre of water and half a litre of lemon juice for every litre of water, sugar and zest.
Salvatore loves tradition and, above all, he loves his land, with its exclusively genuine products. One of the secrets that make his cakes so special are in fact the raw materials: 'The ricotta cheese I use is produced 500 metres from my workshop: I want to have total control over the products I use. I make my own mascarpone at home, I make my own yoghurt. For the fruit, I choose the best in season from my farmer friends, who even pick it when I want. For example, I have my apricots picked at the best time, and then I store them: I wash them, stone them and freeze them so that I have those apricots all year round.
With the cold chain I can store all my fruit and vegetables: in January I pick and store annurche apples, candonga strawberries in May. I have to have my fruit to make sweets, nectars, jams, marmalades. Everything I prepare comes from an ingredient that I put aside for the whole year, because I want that constant quality. And if it runs out, I don't make the dessert or the dish again until I have the ingredient again. You know, to make a good parmigiana you have to use a type of aubergine that only ripens in August, the seedless violet. Once those are finished, the parmigiana will only be on the menu when the aubergines are harvested again.
Product quality is fundamental, and then there is technique and technology. The laboratory helps a lot: vacuum processing, cold candying, and so on. I always try to keep up with the times, using modern equipment. Technology helps us to work better, to still guarantee
higher quality'.
Salvatore's father was a forerunner of technology: a vertical whipping machine, ditto for the brine machine. And Sal De Riso made his workshop a
example of how creativity gives the best in efficiency thanks to technologically advanced equipment. This is also why his pastries are described as modern, mouth-watering and fresh. But that's not all.
'I was a kid,' he explains, 'when I learned how to make traditional pastries. Later I worked for many years in the kitchen (and in his bistro, in addition to sweets, there is a wide choice of savoury food) and finally I wanted to bring a bit of innovation to pastry, but always holding on to tradition, because traditional sweets are as important as the gastronomic cultures of each country or place where you live.
I still remember when I made the first lemon profiterole instead of the classic chocolate one. It was a novelty but it was a success and I realised that that was the right way: to innovate pastry making by making the best use of all the products I always had available thanks to my land. I studied new techniques and new combinations, also to lighten the pastry. The tradition, the gluttony, the sensuality that satisfies... all this must remain. You eat a slice of Pastiera, a Sfogliatella, a chocolate cake and they must satisfy you; the pastry chef's flair and modernity lie in making those desserts lighter, and perhaps more beautiful because they are presented in a different way'.
And when inspiration and modernity embrace tradition while innovating, Sal De Riso invents a new cake that then makes history. Like the ricotta and pear cake: another tale
to be listened to with closed eyes.
"The ricotta and pear cake was born in August 1997 when a farmer from Agerola, a small village above Amalfi, brought me a crate of pears, the pere pennate, which have a rounded shape that looks more like an apple than a pear. I tasted one with the whole peel and it was delicious, really sweet. The pear was a little-used ingredient in pastries. He came with this crate full and said to me: So I
I started cutting them up, cubed them and then cooked them in a pan with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and a little sugar and vanilla.
Cooked right into cubes, leaving them a bit crunchy. I started thinking about what to do with them: a cake, a mousse, a tart. While I was thinking, on the other side of the counter I was making pastries. I had some extra ricotta and tried this combination of ricotta with pears. It was truly spectacular! So I used two Sciffori hazelnut sponge cake bases for this cake. I created this cake with these three ingredients: ricotta, hazelnuts and pears. And I wanted it to be simple in appearance as well, something a little elaborate that looked a little like the ricotta cheese that the shepherd puts out to dry. Here, the sponge cake biscuit on top and underneath gave me the idea of seasoned ricotta. And even at the beginning I would caramelise some icing sugar with a griddle and pour it on top, to give even more of an idea of matured cheese'.
Salvatore started selling this cake and... from a crate of pitted pears given as gifts, a cake of national resonance was born. La Sal de Riso's Ricotta and Pear Pie is one of the most imitated cakes, a registered trademark on a par with Lemon Delight.
Everyone knows that it was Sal De Riso who created these sweets and now I know that Salvatore, if you close your eyes, can make you eat them through his words.
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