Green tea ice cream in Rome

Last Saturday evening, Cart and I dropped by a gelateria called Il Gelato di Claudio Torcè. There was an event hosted by the well known food blogger, Katie of Parlafood. Unfortunately I only knew about this last minute through.

Anyway, Il gelato is located in the charming area off Via del Corso, but it’s fairly attainable with a bit of a walk from the closest metro (Spagna).

Anyway, inside, there are so many different types of gelati. And if you’ve been living in Italy for a while, you can tell more or less tell by sight if it was handmade (artigianale) or not. Firstly, the gelati doesn’t look overly fluffy.

But it was quite mind boggling to decide at the first visit. There were so many kinds! In fact, it was divided into two segments. Just look at their chocolate ice cream segment. Even a chocolate lover like me was stumped at what to get.

There was the chocolate, the dark chocolate, the extra dark chocolate. If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, there is chocolate with cinnamon, chocolate with ginger and lemon, chocolate with chilli … The choices go on.

I was a little overwhelmed so we chose to have the set-apperativo in the end. I was looking around at the other plates and Cart and I were a little worried as we saw something looking like ham, so we asked for those to be omitted and asked for the prosecco to be changed to coca cola.

And then we got this :

Huh? Gelato with nachos and vegetable slices is a strange combination. But there are stranger flavours of ice cream around the world like Horse Meat, Charcoal and Wasabi so I had to keep an open mind, moreover it’s not ice cream-ice cream, it’s an apperativo-ice cream.

So let’s start!

This bright and cheerful orange gelato here is peperoni (not to be mistaken for cured sausages).

Have you ever had bell pepper ice cream before? No? Me neither. Tasting it, you can definitely detect the bell peppers inside, but it was refreshingly creamy. And it went surprisingly well with the vegetable slices.

This is the pistacchio ice cream.

A little bit tainted with the orange peperoni bits. Nevertheless, I quite like at how light it tastes like, and that it was slightly gritty with the little bits of pistacchio inside.

And then this is Cart’s half eaten Gorgonzola ice cream.

I have to admit that this definitely is an acquired taste and probably not for everyone. I’m not a big fan of ripe cheese but I gave it a try anyway. And indeed it was very strong. If you were blindfolded while eating this, you could actually tell from the smell that it was made of blue veined cheese.

The taste is completely unique. And it was really wierd for me to taste it as a gelato. Cart, who adores cheese, liked this though.

I was observing some of the other guests who were there trying out this ice cream, and I was amused to see them had the same curious reaction as I did.

Luckily for me, I was able to change mine to another flavour.

Green tea! I’m crazy about Matcha ice cream and it was love at first taste for me when I first tried it at a Japanese dessert shop. And this was the first time that I’ve ever seen Matcha green tea gelato in Rome.

Cart didn’t like it so much though  and thought that it tasted like grass. Nevertheless, this made me so happy! It’s the little things like these that makes life memorable 🙂

Il Gelato di Claudio Torcè
Piazza Monte D’Oro 91/92

If you liked this post, you might enjoy :

• Il Gelato di San Crispino
• Tony Gelateria