The world's sweetest competition came to a close on Sunday night when the Gelato World Tour, an event run by Carpigiani Gelato University (a real place) and the Italian expo group Sigep, brought together 36 finalists for the conclusion of its three-year, international tournament. Preliminary rounds were held in Shenzen, Chicago, Tokyo, Berlin, Austin, Dubai, Melbourne, Valencia and Rome, and while it seems like a missed opportunity to not call it the Gelato World Cup, the event drew 50,000 hungry people to the coastal Italian city of Rimini to sample 5,511 pounds of gelato from 36 gelaterias around the world over the course of three days.
The winner: a humble scoop of pistachio by Alessandro Crispini of Gelateria Crispini in the Umbrian town of Spoleto.
The frozen delicacy is made from a combination of three Sicilian pistachio varieties (two sourced from Bronte, a town at the base of Mount Etna, and one from the ancient coastal city of Agrigentino) that are slow-toasted for 24 hours before being tossed in a mixture of sugar and Madagascar vanilla beans, then blended with cream, whole pistachios, caramelized sugar and a hit of Adriatic sea salt.
"I'm really excited and I didn't expect to win," Crispini said, clutching his prize—a huge plastic cone topped with a swoop of what looks like rainbow-striped flames—and a tray of his sage-green concoction. "Pistachio may seem like a banal flavor, but after deeply studying the raw materials, I made something that seems simple but is in fact very complex."
Second place went to "Tribute to La Serenissima," a grape-strawberry sorbet with caramelized nuts, from Guido and Luca De Rocco (two brothers of Italian descent, who named the flavor in honor of their roots in the Veneto region) of the 50-year-old Eiscafé De Rocco in Schwabach (a suburb of Nuremberg), Germany. In third was chef Daniela Lince Ledesma's "Amor-Acuyà," a mix of passion fruit, Colombian Cream, and 65 percent dark chocolate that she serves at her ice cream shop by the same name in Medellín, Colombia.
Though it seems obvious that the prize would go to an Italian, the finalists came from 19 countries around the world, including a coconut-and-palm-sugar caramel entry from Singapore's Momolato; a fior di latte with caramelized fig and balsamic from all-natural Black Market Gelato in North Hollywood, California; and a rosewater cream studded with chunks of Turkish delight from Caprices du Palais in Keserwen, Lebanon.
In addition to votes from event attendees, the gelati were judged by a jury of 47 "ice cream experts" that included a delegate from the James Beard Foundation, chefs, food critics, and the "historian and curator of the Gelato Museum Carpigiani"—the ultimate dream job.
Trays of gelato