Alain Ducasse’s bread ice cream, “it’s the happiness of the baguette nibbled on the return from the market”

DFirst of all, it’s the name that seduces. Bread ice cream. The title is reminiscent of ice cream buns, those snacks swallowed at the end of hot afternoons in Palermo. However, that is not what it is about. Bread ice cream is an invention of Matteo Casone, an Italian to whom Alain Ducasse entrusted the creation of his range of ice creams, launched in June 2021. It was while visiting an ice cream turbine factory in Bologna that the chef with 34 restaurants around the world and with 20 Michelin stars met Matteo Casone.

The latter, a former swimmer, who ate ice cream every day of his childhood, made him taste some of his creations. Including a grapefruit sorbet, seasoned with vermouth. Enthusiastic, Ducasse, anxious to diversify his offer, as he did with chocolate, coffee or more recently biscuits, offered the Italian to join him in Paris.

But we digress. The bread ice cream, awarded in December at the Fou de Pâtisserie Trophies, is the second stage of a major project by Matteo Casone: to develop bruschetta, this antipasti which, depending on the talent of the cook, can be a delight of simplicity or a foil , and which consists of only three elements, oil, bread, tomato.

Casone imagined an olive oil ice cream in 2021. While thinking about tomato, he launched, in 2022, bread ice cream. And, as bruschetta is, historically, a way of eating stale bread from the day before, the ice cream parlor uses scraps salvaged from the Parisian addresses of Alain Ducasse. They are then infused in milk, incorporated into the cream, and before the turbine.

A childhood dream

It’s a whole ceremony. The ball is served sprinkled with five seeds (sunflower, black and white flax, black sesame and roasted buckwheat) that you can feel crunching under your teeth. Then, once the ice cream settles on the tongue, it is the bitterness of the crust that manifests itself, followed closely by the sweetness of the crumb.

Bread ice cream is the enveloping happiness of a slice of bread left on the dinner plate and devoured when clearing away. It is the start of the baguette nibbled on returning from the market. “Is he sensitive to the smell of toast? », asked Valérie Lemercier in 1996 in the song When I saw himseeing there a sign of desirability of a man.

For all the flavors, Alain Ducasse asked Matteo Casone to use as little sugar and lactose as possible. His idea was to provide “ice cream to eat”. It may seem obvious, but all the genius of Matteo Casone was to work the product at a lower temperature than the rest of the Parisian ice cream parlors, so that it retains its texture.

One would say that there is something of a childish dream in an ice cream that melts more slowly, almost infinite. But this bread ice cream is above all reminiscent of another pleasure: that of the flâneur in Bologna or Rome who stops in a gelateria artisanal and abandons classic perfumes for a new flavor. A furtive moment which will mark him, will remain in him, when, the unfortunate, he will be far from Italy.