Kitchen Project #110: On Fruit and Ice Cream
A guide with La Grotta Ices
Hello,
Welcome to today’s edition of Kitchen Projects. Thank you so much for being here.
I’m so excited about today’s newsletter because we’re back for a KP Teacher series. This week, I dive into the wonderful world of Ice Cream with Kitty Travers of La Grotta Ices and get to share her recipe for peach and basil sorbet.
Over on KP+, the icy party continues with a recipe for Cucumber and Sour Cream ice cream. Yep! That’s a thing. It’s hard to explain quite how in love I am with this recipe and I IMPLORE you to try it. Click here to read it.
What’s KP+? Well, it’s the level-up version of this newsletter. By joining KP+, you will support the writing and research that goes into the newsletter (including the commissioning - and fair payment - of all the writers) and join a growing community, access extra content (inc. the full archive) and more. Subscribing is easy and only costs £5 per month. Why not give it a go? Come n join the gang!
Love,
Nicola
So… what is the KP teacher series?
A huge part of what drives this newsletter is a curiosity about food. I’m the first to admit that my expertise has limits, and I love nothing more than learning and listening. So every now and then, I’ll be heading into the kitchen or workspace of an expert, whether that’s a professional kitchen or a grandmother’s home, and becoming a student all over again!
Launched last year, I spend the day learning from them, asking ALL the questions, passing that knowledge onto you, and sharing their food story. I’ll also be sharing one of their tried & tested recipes for you to try at home. For previous editions of the teacher series, see below:
Fluffy steamed buns with Lillian Luk of Shanghai Supper Club
Apple Pie with food historian, chef and writer Chloe Rose Crabtree
The joy of iced biscuits with Pam Jones of Lemon Tree Cakes
Let’s get into it!
On fruit and ice cream
A short walk from the concrete jungle of elephant & castle in South London is a leafy garden square flanked with ancient Mulberry trees. These trees have grown abstractly from the ground, reaching almost as far laterally as upward. In spite of the ‘Do not climb’ pleas, the trees are perfect for scaling and easy to pick from, though the fruit wasn’t much to look at yet - rock-hard green alien-like blobs. A shame, I thought, since I’d never actually tried Mulberries before. But in a perfect twist of fate, like the Ice Cream Gods (they exist) were listening, I found myself tucking into freshly churned and swirled mulberry and peach ice cream at the nearby kitchen (the famous “Ice cream shed”) of La Grotta Ices just a few hours later.
“Those four trees are the King James variety,” Kitty Travers, owner and head ice cream maker of La Grotta Ices, explains. “They ripen in August.” Gesturing at the spoon of bruised purple and soft pink ice cream, she explains, “This is the variety that you get in Italy.”
Although Kitty’s official job is ‘ice cream maker’, you could just as easily think of her as a fruit whisperer. Her fruit ice creams and sorbets are pure expressions of the character and flavour. As well as working with fruits at their peak, it’s her admirable whole-fruit approach that sets her apart from other ice cream makers (often by miles, in my opinion.)
Where possible, she gets all parts of the plant involved, from leaf to seed, sometimes mixing the leaf of one fruit with the flesh of another. Producing relatively small batches of ice cream makes for hyper-seasonal tailored flavours that gently fluctuate during the season. One week in summer may see a nectarine take the stage solo but be accompanied by tarragon the next.
Inspired by the small, family-run ice cream businesses found all over Italy, Kitty set out to create La Grotta as an ever-changing palette of flavours. Her speciality fruit Ice Creams are a homage to the ice cream parlours of her travels, but they are not at all traditional. You’re unlikely to find cream-based fruit ice creams in traditional gelato shops - usually, sorbets and cream-based frozen desserts are kept separate. This, extraordinarily, has the effect of a bizarre whiplash nostalgia - her ice creams feel traditional yet brand new at the same time. It’s quite confusing, remarkable and joyful. So where does all this inspiration come from?
A history of La Grotta (and Kitty!)
Kitty’s unique approach can be traced to her intriguing patchwork-like background, from her (albeit brief) time at art school, to a summer spent working in a cafe in Marseille, to being Poilane’s first British shop girl, to long shifts waitressing in Cannes, to a chef Diploma in New York and stages in restaurants around the city. She finally settled back in London, where she spent five years working on the pastry section for Fergus and Margot Henderson at St John Bread & Wine and Rochelle Canteen, respectively, learning from her peers and developing her craft.
Every chance she got, of course, was spent taking research (and pleasure) trips to Italy to eat as much gelato as she could, led by a chapter of food writer & essayist Jeffrey Steingarten’s book ‘The Man Who Ate Everything.’ Kitty had read this book years before, before culinary school, before St John, and had particularly connected with the essay that detailed his search for the best gelato in the world. With the help of her Italian friends, she diligently wrote to every gelato shop, asking to apprentice at their shops. Not one replied. Years later, on one of her research trips, she found herself at one of these shops while on a backpacking trip through Sicily.
After enquiring about how the tangerine sorbet was made, the waiter told her about a funny letter they had pinned on the wall in the kitchen, one they had received from an English girl years before. It was Kitty’s letter! The elderly owner of the ice cream shop showed her around and gave her local ingredients to taste. It was at this moment (spurred on by the owner’s kind yet discouraging words that she would not be able to make Ice Cream like an Italian) she decided to focus her attention fully on Ice Cream, finally establishing La Grotta Ices in 2008. The name meaning ‘cave’ or ‘grotto’ is a homage to the first ice cream shop from her days waitressing in Cannes.
Kitty now produces an ever-changing menu of ice creams and sorbet for La Grotta Ices (and the occasional choc ice), the mix of which completely depends on the produce she receives. “I got some really lovely melons from Calabria recently. The flavour was so mad and intense I didn’t want to add any dairy to it. The farmer who grows them says that it’s the best they’ve been for six years.” She tells me. “I had the melons sitting here for a few days before I used them, and the whole shed just filled with the most amazing smell. It was like going to the supermarket on holiday in France.”
Although you rarely find it listed among the typical jams, jellies and chutneys, I’ve always thought that Ice Cream and sorbet should be considered a preserve. By blending fruits with dairy for ice cream or blitzing with sugar syrup for sorbet, you can capture fruits at their peak and freeze them to be enjoyed later. (Side note: Ice cream, especially those made without stabilisers, will degrade at a faster rate than a jam, but it’s still a pretty good enjoy-later solution!)
How to find La Grotta
I first heard about La Grotta Ices and the famous “Ice Cream Shed” whilst working at Little Bread Pedlar in South London. There was a feeling of real camaraderie among the local businesses, and the Bermondsey, Tower Bridge, and Elephant & Castle food triangle was particularly tight-knit. The bakery would use the stout from the next-door brewery, the butchery would supply the charcuterie, the cheesemonger would stock a fridge at the greengrocers, and the greengrocers would provide fruit for the preservers, who, in turn, would provide their jams and jellies to the bakery.
It was a humming ecosystem of small businesses with a shared ethos and goal - to make delicious, real - and often slow - food. During my time at the bakery, we’d get a request every so often from Kitty for miniature brioche buns, which she would stuff with ice cream and sell during the market days, Sicilian style. Her stall, of course, was right in front of the greengrocers that she’d bought the fruit from in the first place.
Admittedly, La Grotta Ices is a little bit elusive. And if it wasn’t, I’m not sure that it would be the ice cream that it is - her process does not suit a mass-produced product that is supposed to last for a decade in the freezer. But it CAN be found: Currently stocked at three regular locations - Leilas Shop, General Store and e5 Bakehouse - as well as on the menu at Polentina in Bow, it is well worth tracking down.
I love the La Grotta approach to flavours so much that I’ve developed a bit of a Pavlovian response to the blue and white cartons with their (often handwritten) names on the front. Kitty’s flavours jump off of the menu and beg to be eaten. La Grotta is legendary - it’s no surprise it was right at the top of the incredibly thorough Vittles Ice Cream Index! On the day I visited the kitchen, I tasted Strawberry Salad, Salted cucumber and sour cream, raspberry and verbena, nectarine and tarragon, Sheep's milk yoghurt and Lime and muscovado, among others. Each was a total knockout.
How to learn from La Grotta
Fortunately for those without a La Grotta stockist nearby, Kitty has authored a brilliant book, ‘La Grotta Ices’ so at least we can DIY her flavours at home. I think it is essential reading for anyone interested in desserts, pastries or - to be honest - flavour! Even if you don’t plan to make ice cream, the flavour combinations and syrups are overwhelmingly inspiring. Kitty’s white peach and tomato sorbet could easily spark an idea for a salad or a galette, or her dairy infusions could be used to make set tarts or pouring custards. Just reading the contents page reminds me of fruits I’d forgotten existed and evokes memories of European summer holidays that I’d filed away. It radiates warmth, joy, the feel of sticky ice cream fingers and last-minute trips with friends.
The extraordinary recipes are matched with extraordinary images shot by US-based Grant Cornett in the height of summer in 2016. After a chance sighting of his photo story of meatloaf in the New York Times and encouraged by her sister, Kitty shot him an out-of-the-blue email. He accepted immediately.
“I had a month to get a year of ice creams together!” she explains. “About two weeks before he was due to come, I’d made nearly all of the ice creams.” But one morning before his arrival, Kitty came into the ice cream shed, and something felt “different.” She went over to the freezer where she’d been storing all of the ice creams and opened up the lid. “I picked up a tub of ice cream and shook it. It went ‘slosh slosh slosh!.” The freezer had turned off, and every single ice cream she had prepped for the shoot had melted. Looking through the finished book, packed with vibrant images that fizz off the page, you’d never know it was preceded by a full-blown ice cream emergency.
Kitty also runs a long-established Ice Cream course at The School of Artisan Foods in Nottinghamshire. “Loads of people that I’ve taught”, she tells me, “have gone on to open really successful ice cream businesses, which is amazing.” In this course, Kitty covers all the basics of Ice Cream alchemy, from balancing your own recipes and achieving that perfect blend of fat, sugar, air, water, solids and emulsifiers. By teaching nine (!!!) variations of ‘plain’ bases, she guides her students through the techniques that influence texture and flavour, as well as giving you the opportunity to create three of your own seasonal ice creams. Her next three courses will take place in 2024. Kitty also runs occasional workshops in North London - the best way to find out when these are scheduled is via Instagram.
If my day spent with Kitty in the Ice Cream shed is even a taste of what it is like to learn from her, I can’t recommend it enough. Here are three of the lessons I learned:
Lesson one: Working with fruit and the base ingredients
At the La Grotta Ices, everything begins with fruit. Procured through careful sniffing at the market, a trusted network of importers and suppliers or even from Kitty’s own garden, the transformation then begins.
On the day that I visited, Kitty produced a tub of nectarines that had been macerating in sugar for two days. “It’s only two days because I didn’t have time to use them yesterday.” Macerated in about 15% sugar weight (with the skin on for best coloured puree!), the amount of syrup was extraordinary. The nectarines must have been ripe and ready to give away their water. “When they arrived, they were rock hard. But the temperature in the shed is perfect because I don’t often have the air conditioning on, and the temperature is perfect for ripening fruit.” The best way to do this? She simply pops a tea towel over the top and leaves them for a few days. Sometimes the fruit moves faster than she can. “This year, I got some amazing Spanish loquats, the nespoles. I froze them, but they oxidised, and you can taste that oxidised flavour.”
From the same fridge, she also produced an intense batch of blackcurrant leaf syrup destined for granita. Picked the previous week on a farm, Kitty had steeped the leaves for several days at a ratio of 10% leaves to simple syrup, its verdant, Ribena-on-acid scent captivating me completely.
To make her ice cream, Kitty uses high-quality whole milk from The Estate or Northiam Dairy. “It’s higher in protein than other milk, which gives the ice cream more body.” That’s casein and whey she’s talking about - it accounts for an average of 3.5% of the milk. It’s hard to ask for high-protein milk, but a good dairy will produce high-quality milk, so for ice cream, it’s sensible to buy the best you can find. To this, she adds caster sugar which she favours for the “clean flavour.” Most ice cream recipes (and certainly everywhere I’ve worked professionally) may have long lists of unfamiliar ingredients - dextrose, glucose, trimoline, stabilisers - but Kitty’s recipes are minimal. “Dextrose is really amazing for texture, but for flavour, I prefer sugar.”
Kitty also avoids bulking ingredients like dry milk powder, which, in her opinion, “interrupt the sweet, pure flavour of fresh cream and milk.” This commitment to simplicity makes Kitty’s ice creams quite doable for the home cook. Her ice creams tend to be lower in fat to let the flavours shine “uninhibited”. By avoiding milk powder, which is high in protein, her ice creams are not overly aerated - the more protein, the more ‘overrun’ or ‘air’ you can whip into ice creams (Mr Whippy likely has a lot of protein and stabilisers in).
One less familiar ingredient Kitty uses in her ice creams is Carrageenan powder. Derived from seaweed, it gels liquids very effectively. Though it doesn’t appear often in her recipes, Kitty uses it to help add a super smooth texture to certain ice creams. During my visit, I watched her transform lime juice into a thick, wobbly mass of jelly to later be blended into a custard base to make a perfectly smooth balance of zing and creaminess.
Lesson two: Intensifying flavours and colour
Working with fruits offers an interesting proposition, doesn’t it? You want to transform the fruit into something completely different while still maintaining the character. It’s a remarkable feat to take something apart and put it back together without spoiling the spirit of the thing.
Although Kitty works exclusively on ice cream recipes, many of her techniques are lessons to be learned for lots of other applications. During my visit (and much to my delight), Kitty was trying her hand at a lime custard ice cream for the very first time. She’d been offered a huge box of leftover limes from a friend’s catering job. Watching her percolate on how to approach the ice cream in real time was a total treat. “You have to be careful that things aren’t too caustic or taste like toilet cleaner. That is always a risk!” she explains.
To start, she reduced the lime juice by a third, which intensified the flavour, before adding more juice back in for freshness then gelling with carrageenan. This was blitzed into a custard base then brought to 82c. To keep the notes bright, she added the lime zest to the custard for a brief 10-20 seconds before passing through a sieve. “To avoid bitterness,” she explains. The resultant base tasted extraordinarily of citrussy cake batter. She notes down the formula onto a pile of loose, blank a4 sheets which make up her accordion-esque free-form recipe file.
“I think people are often so scared of things not tasting enough that they over steep things,” she tells me. Evidence of Kitty’s commitment to ‘just enough’ is clear throughout her book - peach leaves, she explains, should only be steeped for three minutes unless you want them ‘composty’. This subtle hand makes her ice cream incredibly refreshing and light to eat. Infusions are, I’m afraid, a trial and error process, though Kitty’s book is filled with formulations that could guide you in the right direction flavour-wise.
For a nectarine lemon verbena custard base, I watched Kitty scald the cream and milk, then toss in the freshly picked leaves. She immediately sealed the top of the pan with cling film and moved it into a sink filled with cold water. “Putting it in cold water”, she explains, “is a really low-tech way of doing something a tiny bit techy.” I’m hooked. “If the water's cold, you create a vacuum, and [the cling film] will become quite convex. And that really helps pull the flavour in.”
Another glorious sight was a tub of strawberry pip juice. After sieving berries, Kitty washes the leftover pips with clean water and moves them into a jug to sit overnight. The next day, she strains the pips and is left with a gem-coloured clear fruit squash. Refreshing and economical.
Once the custard bases are made, they are left to mature overnight. Good things come to those who wait, I’m afraid. But there is a science to it: Ice cream bases need to be rested overnight. As Kitty explains, this is “essential for the proteins and sugars to fully absorb.” You see, as ice cream rests - or ‘matures’ and the ingredients settle, resulting in an improved flavour and final texture. For those looking for a faster fix, you’ll be happy to know that sorbet, a simpler mix of fruit, water and sugar, can be chilled and churned immediately.
Lesson three: The churn, texture and equipment
This prioritisation of ‘flavour over texture’ is compensated with the machinery she uses: The pacojet. What is a pacojet? The pacojet was invented in the 90s and has fast become a chef's favourite tool - it works by very finely shaving frozen blocks of ice cream base into very thin sheets - basically pureeing or ‘pacotizing’ it. Kitty explains that this machinery “makes the ice crystals really small.” Basically, the smaller the ice crystals, the more evenly it melts and the smoother it is to eat.
While these machines are very good for lower fat ice creams and sorbets, it can really buckle for higher fat formulations, the fat splitting and hardening around the blades and sending the (expensive) machine to temporary retirement. It also churns just one litre at a time (albeit in a matter of minutes), meaning Kitty’s process is labour-intensive. Thanks to her long-established course at The School of Artisan Food, all of her recipes have all been tested in traditional ice cream machines.
She is always adjusting her recipes to help them churn better; A whole blitzed lemon, for example, will add natural pectin and body to the ice cream to give it a better final texture thanks to its inherent stabilising qualities. Research shows that adding pectin to ice cream can increase viscosity and improve scoopability in lower-fat ice creams and can even be used as a fat replacer in formulations that have a smooth mouthfeel but do not coat the tongue as much.
When it comes to sorbets and granitas, Kitty does use a refractometer to check the sugar concentration or ‘brix’. With just one drop, you can measure how dense the liquid is with sugar (1% sugar = 1 Brix etc.). This is handy when you work with an ever-changing roster of fruits which may vary in sugar from year to year, crop to crop.
But, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the oldest piece of equipment in Kitty’s kitchen that is also her favourite. And it’s remarkably low tech: A single heavy-duty stainless steel urn that she ages her ice cream bases in. “I bought it so long ago, it was a real gamble.” She explains. “It’s so good. It gets so cold and never retains any flavour. And it never oxidises.” It sums up La Grotta very well, to be honest, an embodiment of Kitty’s ethos: Simple and gloriously unfussy, a timeless blend of craftsmanship and tradition which wholeheartedly keeps flavour as the focus.
To keep up with Kitty, get the latest news on her workshops in London and at the School of Artisan Food, follow her on Instagram @lagrottaices. Her first book ‘La Grotta Ices’ is available to order everywhere.
Peach and Basil sorbet
Excerpt from ‘La Grotta Ices’ by Kitty Travers.
Note from Kitty: You can use tinned peaches if you add a bit of extra lemon juice to compensate for the extra sugar!
I like sorbet, but unless it's a scorching hot day, I like it best with a scoop of ice cream or blob of thick whipped cream on the side. Not only because the combination of fresh fruit and sweet grassy cream is a winner, but because I live in England where we need the extra calories of cream to keep us warm. Realistically it's only really hot enough to tolerate ice-cold frozen fruit about three days a year. This sorbet is destined for one of those days. It's best made with those big, rich peaches with highlighter-yellow flesh - the kind used for tinned peaches (sometimes called peroche or clingstone).
Oddly, for such a bold-tasting herb as basil, combining it with peach creates such a wonderful synthesis of flavours - you almost don't notice that it's there. Instead, you wonder whether this is the way that ripe peaches are always supposed to taste - like warm skin in the sun, and Italy and summer holidays.
Ingredients
160g Granulated Sugar
160ml Water
40g Basil Leaves
525g Ripe Yellow Peach (about 3 large)
Zest and juice of 1 lemon, preferably unwaxed
Method
To prepare the sorbet: put the sugar and water into a small pan and bring to a gentle simmer to make a simple syrup. The moment it simmers, remove it from the heat and stir in the basil leaves to submerge. Cover the pan tightly with cling film and place it in a sink of iced water, allowing the basil to steep in the cooling syrup.
Taste the syrup after 15 minutes; it should taste warmly fragrant with basil. If necessary, steep for a further 5 minutes to boost the flavour before testing again. Do not leave it for more than 30 minutes in total - basil is a 'wet' herb, and it will begin to taste weedy if left to stew in the syrup for too long.
Strain the syrup into a clean container using a fine-mesh sieve or chinois. Squeeze hard on the basil to extract as much flavour as possible, then discard the basil leaves.
Rinse the peaches and slice them roughly into the basil syrup. Add the lemon zest and juice, then cover and chill in the fridge overnight.
To make the sorbet: the following day, remove the syrupy peaches from the fridge and liquidise for 2 minutes until very smooth. Pass the mixture through a fine-mesh sieve or chinois, discarding the skin.
Pour the bright yellow purée into an ice cream machine and churn according to the machine's instructions, usually about 20-25 minutes, or until frozen and thick and creamy-looking.
Transfer the sorbet to a suitable lidded container. Top with a piece of waxed paper to limit exposure to air, cover and freeze until ready to serve. Best eaten within 2 weeks.
For Kitty’s outstanding recipe for the La Grotta classic ‘Cucumber and Sour Cream Ice Cream’, click here:
Want to make ice cream without an ice cream machine? I suggest reading these previous Kitchen Projects to brush up on your skills:
All about Sorbet (How to use a food processor!)
I am EXCITED about this! Might have ordered the book already 🙊
My word this is inspirational! Thank you for sharing and introducing me to the phenomenal Kitty! Stalking her Instagram now 😂