The collaboration had begun last year with a brioche. The one with the tuppo, of course.
Teaching the young people of Cotti in Fragranza how to make it was Giovanna Musumeci, Sicilian master gelato maker and member of the Board of Sherbeth Festival. The brioscia produced in the Palermo workshop then became the Festival’s official one, served during the days of the event alongside the gelato in competition.
This year things go a little further: the young people will make the gelato too.
Sherbeth is working with Cotti in Fragranza on a programme that will bring artisan gelato making inside the workshop. The Festival has also contributed the equipment needed, donating a gelato display cabinet, while some master gelato makers will arrive in the days before the event to work with the young people and teach them techniques, processes and production steps.
Then it will be their turn.
The flavour that arrives at Sherbeth will in fact be produced directly by the young people of Cotti in Fragranza, using raw materials from Libera Terra as well.
It is an important step for a project born in 2016 inside the Malaspina juvenile detention centre in Palermo, and which over the years has become a place of training and employment. Cotti in Fragranza is known above all for its work on bread and baked goods; the arrival of gelato now widens the skills the young people can acquire in the workshop.
And this is precisely the aspect that interests Sherbeth: teaching a trade.
During the Festival the gelato made by the young people will also be an occasion to tell the public how the project began, who worked on it and what lies behind a product that, once it reaches the display cabinet, looks like all the others but has a decidedly different story.
The collaboration will continue outside the main circuit of the event as well. On Saturday 14 November a Sherbeth Off is planned in the spaces of Cotti in Fragranza. A master gelato maker will work alongside the house chef to build a dinner in which gelato enters the menu and the kitchen, without necessarily being confined to dessert.
Two years ago Cotti in Fragranza made mainly bread, biscuits and baked goods. Last year the young people prepared the brioscia col tuppo for Sherbeth. This year they will produce their own gelato.
It is a small, very concrete step forward. And it is perhaps the simplest way to tell what a festival can do when it decides to step outside the perimeter of the event for a few days.
