Gelato

When I first visited Germany with Stefan 19 years ago, Munich, Herrsching, and other Bavarian tourist meccas were filled with gelato shops. The gelatos were made by small scale operations in small batches, often run by Italians who headed northward for their summers. Less rich and with more intense flavors than American ice creams, our favorites included Maracuja (passion fruit), Johannisbeere (currant), Mango, Gianduja (hazelnut), Mocca, and Stracciatella (sweet cream with chocolate bits).

This June, we noticed freshly made gelatos were harder to find; many ice cream shops in Munich were selling factory-made ice creams that could just as easily be purchased by the (diminutive) tub at the supermarket. Of course, price consciousness and do-it-yourselfness are not the point of buying an ice cream cone to eat while strolling along the Ammersee, just as they aren't the point of going out for Brotzeit; nonetheless, there has been a tangible drop in Bavaria's ice cream quaintness quotient over the past two decades.

Thus, one of the joys of living in Freiburg has been discovering that its downtown is rife with gelaterias. To say they are competing for tourists would be inaccurate, as there are clearly enough Eis-hungry tourists to go around. The best shops serve small-batch flavors at prices so affordable that they mandate regular return visits. Our current favorite is a window shop near the Augustiner Museum where the milk ices are barely sweet and more milky than creamy, and the fruit ices are refreshingly tangy.

On our most recent visit there, the shopkeeper detected our foreign accents and laughingly complimented our pronunciation of "Stracciatella." "I've heard everything," he said, explaining that the previous day a child had asked for "Cacatella." Now that's a flavor I wouldn't want to try, though the concept would probably go over well with every three-year-old I know.