Food 'n' Drink – Food and Drink news |

New La Gelatiera Gelato parlour opens in Covent Garden

Covent Garden is set to become London’s hotspot for high-end Italian gelato, as LA GELATIERA artisan gelato, opens for business at no. 27 New Row. The new gelato and coffee parlour will be serving up the finest Italian frozen deserts with a modern, healthy twist, to excite our taste buds and bring a bit of sunshine into the winter months.

With Londoners already developing an appetite for traditional gelato, LA GELATIERA has arrived at the right time. The gelato parlour offers its own take on the age-old delicacy and combines the owners’ family heritage of artisanal gelato making with their slow food ethic, incorporating healthy seasonal ingredients into their creations. The result is inventive flavours, like its delicious white peach and prosecco Bellini, and Ricotta e Fichi, a southern delicacy made of Sicilian ricotta and figs. Coffee and gelato go hand in hand, and quality, barista-made artisan coffee, will be available to compliment the variety of deserts on offer, with changing seasonal blends to represent some of the best coffee around.

Craftsmanship and tradition are at the heart of LA GELATIERA, with its roots in Gelato-making from the Calabria region in Southern Italy. “When I was 10 years old, I peeked into the kitchen of my favourite ice cream shop for the first time and discovered a marvellous world,” says co-owner Antonio Parsi “Now, many years later, Simona and I have recreated this passion to bring marvellous gelato to London.”

LA GELATIERA seeks to make eating and meeting for a gelato and a coffee a social occasion for all seasons, and the new shop, designed by Hendzel + Hunt, helps to create this experience. Here customer’s can watch the gelato churning process in an in-house laboratory, and have their coffee made the traditional way, with LA GELATIERA’s vintage handmade Victoria Arduino lever machine; before relaxing in the handcrafted shop furniture constructed from reclaimed materials.

Owner and gelato maker Antonio and co-owner Simona are passionate advocates of the Slow Food movement. LA GELATIERA incorporates the best local dairy with fruit sustainably sourced from the highest quality producers in the world to create gelato that is refreshing, flavourful, rich in vitamins and proteins, and low in fat (on average 6% – 8% for gelato and 0% for sorbet). Its coffee suppliers are local artisan roasters with a shared ethic when it comes to gelato and coffee- ethically sourced, carefully produced and seasonal.

LA GELATIERA is open weekdays 8am to 10:30pm and weekends 10am to 11:30pm at 27 New Row, Covent Garden, WC2N 4LA, London.

For more information visit www.lagelatiera.co.uk on Facebook or follow them on Twitter @LaGelatiera

Vimto Halloween Bottles

A fiendishly good limited edition of the nation’s favourite fruity drink is set to hit the supermarket shelves this Halloween, as Vimto launches a range of specially designed bottles, perfect for themed parties and other Halloween fun.

The spooky limited edition haunted house designs are available across all 2L bottles of Fizzy Vimto, No Added Sugar and Cherry Vimto. These party sized bottles are great for sharing, so Vimto has designed a special range of creepy cocktail recipes that will add some seriously mixed up fun to your fancy dress frolics.

Here are their yummy Halloween themed Vimto cocktails to keep your little ghouls, goblins and guests entertained this Halloween.

The limited edition Halloween bottles are available in all major supermarkets from early October, so start practising your creepy Vimto Halloween cocktails.

Vimto’s Creepy Cocktail Recipes

Vimto Eyeball Surprise

A supernaturally simple concoction that every stylish spectre will be drinking this Halloween. Use an ice cream scoop to make two ‘eyeballs’ of ice cream and press jelly sweets into each one to create the pupils. Place them in the bottom of a tall chilled goblet and recite a witches incantation. Fill the glass two thirds full of devilishly delicious fizzy Vimto and watch the fiendish foam froth over the top of the glass.

No Added Sugar Vimto Spooky Strawberry Heart

This is a great drink to serve to a scare to your guests. Swirl some No Added Sugar Vimto in with some cranberry juice and pour into individual glasses. Keep up the fear factor with a ‘Bleeding Heart’ made out of a bbq stick speared strawberry. Simply dunk the ‘heart’ into the glass and serve chilled.

Cherry Vimto/ NAS Cherry Vimto Blood Curdling Brew

The perfect cauldron concoction for witches and wizards everywhere! Put the flesh of one chopped melon along with 10 crushed red seedless grapes into your cauldron (or glass if cauldron not available) and blend until they form a ghoulishly bloody pulp! Strain into a glass and top up with fiendishly fruity fizzy Cherry Vimto to create your brew.

Witches tip – Half-fill an ice cube tray with water, add a halved grape to each section and press a raisin into the centre and then freeze to create eyeball ice cubes!

For more fun Halloween recipes, party tips and more visit the Vimto Facebook page at www.facebook.com/vimto or on Twitter @RealVimto.

Truffles are a rare and delicate type of mushroom and are mostly grown in France, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. They are also collected in the United States in Oregon and Washington.

The truffles form a symbolic relationship with the environs around them as they grow underground amongst the roots of elm, chestnut, oak, willow and pine trees. The price of truffles is high due to not being able to grow them commercially or in a cost effective basis.

When in season the chef’s favourite are the winter whole black truffles that are made from Italian fresh black truffles. It gives an exotic aroma in the dishes that contain meat and poultry and also in pasta. Fresh winter truffles season is from November to March. Because of the limited number available, and the fact that this item that is extremely perishable, they cost in excess of £78 per ounce.

By fusing Italian truffles with cheese from the region of Parmesan a creamy and buttery sauce can be made. White Summer Truffles and Cannellini Beans is another dish made with white Italian truffle juice, with water and white beans.

A more inexpensive way to the special flavours can help dishes is using truffle juice and combining it with both appetisers and main courses and by just adding a small amount of juice you have brilliant flavours in seconds.

Fresh truffles are a rare and seasonal product that are hard to acquire and very expensive. Fortunately the pungency and intensity of earthy truffle paste is a great match to combine with many bases like pastes, butters and creams. This enables chefs to give their cuisine the taste of the distinct truffle flavour at a more economical price. A good start to sauces and creams is truffle paste on a base of peanut oil.

The greatest truffles in the world are considered the Perigord black truffles found in France. Rich, delicate butter made of French truffles fuses the complex and intense flavors of French truffles perfectly. This butter can accompany any variety of different dishes transforming them from everyday food to an extraordinary brilliant dish.

Because it is very intense only a very little amount of the butter is needed to give other dishes the flavor. It also can be used to replace other butters. For the best results the truffle but should not be used until the end of the cooking.

Healthy and virtuous eating does not start with the words pie or pastie. The famous phrase of “Who ate all the pies” answers that question for us, if it was good for us, then no one would have eaten all the pies. Because of the content of the average pie, the nutritional value is not usually that high.

Today the humble pie is going up market including more gourmet fillings and trying to associated them with “home cooked” making you remember moms kitchen rather than a conveyor belt in a processing plant. The maligned pastie and pie are staples in British food and the 21^st century may just have change in store for their presentations.

The pie has made a comeback, now being sold on high street and railway station kiosks even in trendy Covent Garden in London. The most well known shop, West Cornwall Patsy Company is enjoying increased sales as popularity grows.

The increase in popularity may come from the fact that a patsy may be considered more wholesome that the pie. Seeing and smelling them helps and knowing they are better than a burger since they have some vegetables helps.

A recipe was recently found in Devon for pasties and dated back to 1510 making it older that the first Cornwall recipes.

UK health officials are trying to eliminate and make illegal unhealthy foods and they are catogorised as such by the level of fat, sugar and salt. The pies and patsy days may be coming to an end as we know it.

This move would undoubtedly cause more than just an uproar therefore it is not likely to be enacted. The last health initiative enacted January 2009 contained Change4Life and talked about the banning of pies, pizza and other not so healthy foods. If this initiative does not help lower obesity in England than government intervention is an alternative.

So the future of the humble pie and pasty remains in the balance.

Coventry based cake artist Laura Edwards won Gold for her Snake Cake, in the sculpted novelty cake category, at last weekend’s Cake International exhibition at the NEC.

The cake (named Eric), which was made from vanilla madeira sponge, was sculpted into the shape of a corn snake.  This was the first major competition that Laura, who only started baking professionally less than a year ago, has won.

Laura, a self-taught cake artist,  is the owner of Chic Cakes which creates bespoke, unique and unusual cakes designed to make any occasion one to remember.

Cake International was a 3 day event featuring presentations from some of the best cake artists in the UK and guest presenters from the United States.

Fans of real ale will be able to go out for a few scoops this summer, but they won’t be left with a hangover thanks to the student inventor of beer flavoured ice-cream.

The Pride of Sheffield Beer Ice Cream will go into mainstream production later this year, after being developed by Sheffield Hallam University food and nutrition student Anna Lowden (left in photo). Anna , 20, invented the tasty tipple-based ice cream during her gap year work placement at the city’s Hope Valley Ice Cream Company, after research showed men eat less of the popular dessert than women. And now several Sheffield pubs are to join the farm where it is produced by stocking the ice cream before it goes into mainstream production later this year.

There is an extra bonus for sweet-toothed snackers – the Pride of Sheffield beer ice-cream contains hardly any alcohol due to the production process. Anna said: “During my work placement I have to come up with a new flavour each month and I’ve been getting more inventive as I go along. We wanted to tempt more men to try ice cream and the result has been really popular – it tastes like the head from a pint of Pride of Sheffield. It’s great that we’ve used a local supplier – we experimented with some different beers but none were quite as successful as the Kelham Island Brewery’s Pride of Sheffield. It’s been a big hit with my friends and Hope Valley is in talks with several pubs to stock it as a dessert this summer.”

Anna is working with the Derbyshire-based company on a year-long work placement before she returns to Sheffield Hallam in September.

Stuart Basford, from Kelham Island Brewery, added: “It has been a pleasure to work with Anna on this project. Anna tried with several of our beers and we were happy to help with the tasting process. Eventually it was our Pride of Sheffield that gave the best taste. I think we have found the ideal dessert to follow one of our Kelham Island Pork Pies.”