Pleasure Palate Gelato Tasting at Bulgarini Gelato August 4, 2007

Time to tempt your palate with all the pleasurable flavors that Southern California has to offer. Join Pleasure Palate as we do some culinary exploring of restaurants (both high-end and holes in the walls), various food and beverage tastings, cooking classes, potlucks and so much more. From savory to sweet, from salty to sour, from spicy to tangy, from exotic to All-American, we'll taste it all, so come along and take your taste buds on the ride of their life. Today is all about getting to know and experience the delicious gelato creations at Bulgarini Gelato!

(excerpts from Jonathan Gold's LA Weekly review)

Anybody can learn to make decent gelato, and the principals of Bulgarini certainly apprenticed with some of the best gelato makers in Rome. But not everybody has the gift. It is a kind of alchemy to capture flavors in their truest, most flattering form, like pinning a butterfly under glass in a way that displays the majestic iridescence while making you forget that you are looking at a bug.

Bulgarini’s chocolate gelato, for example, may use the same Valrhona product that most pastry chefs keep around in massive bars, but instead of emphasizing the winy acidity of good chocolate, this gelato brings out the elusive smokiness, a gentle autumnal tang that usually stays hidden in the mix. In the zabaglione gelato, based on the popular Roman egg-yolk custard, the flavor is so vivid, so pure, that you could swear you’re experiencing not just the particular essence of the egg, but also what the hen in question had for supper the night before last. The chocolate-hazelnut gelato, which 99 chefs out of 100 will make with Nutella spooned straight out of the jar, has the smack of freshly roasted nuts. And the putty-colored pistachio, made with nuts Foldi specially imports from Sicily, traps and magnifies the high, slightly fermented flavor of first-rate pistachios with such purity that you may realize that you have never really tasted a pistachio at all.

Great gelato makers specialize in capturing the ephemeral, the flit of resinous complexity across the midrange of a white peach, the bare hint of sweaty afternoon sex in the scent of a juicy midsummer melon, the phenolic fugue inscribed in the taste of a ripe banana. When you look at a Chardin painting of fruit, the cherries are sweeter, riper, more impossibly aromatic than an actual cherry could ever be. When you taste the cassis sorbet at Paris’ Berthillon, it is more than cassis: rounder, subtler, more exquisitely perfumed than cassis, which in its natural form is a fairly boring kind of black currant. And then there is Bulgarini’s pistachio.

Does Mr. Bulgarini enjoy talking about his gelato? No. He would much rather discuss the last game of the World Cup, kick by kick by kick? But for this special gelato tasting, we'll definitely have his full attention and more.

For just $15, we will be experiencing the following:

• A short talk about gelato and Bulgarini Gelato by by owner, Leo Bulgarini, himself.
  
  
• A tasting of 6 gelatos.
  
  
• a 10% general discount off anything in their store.

For those of you gelato fans, this is definitely the event for you, so please join me for what will a delicious culinary adventure into the world of Bulgarini Gelato!

To purchase tickets, click here!

Official Website: http://www.localwineevents.com/Los-Angeles-Wine/event-138000.html