WTF is stracciatella?

In keeping with last week’s theme of flavors that are difficult to identify and describe (please see the blackcurrant debacle described below), at GiGi’s Gelateria, Melanie and I both tried stracciatella gelato. Before tasting it, there were a few things we knew with certainty: it had a vanilla base, it had chocolate chips, and it looked delicious. After greedily eating our gelato, we knew less about what we just ate than before. GiGI’s stracciatella gelato does not taste the same as its vanilla, as Melanie explained below. So then, what exactly is stracciatella? Good thing the internet has all the answers.

Googling stracciatella yielded unusual results, leading me to believe I had misspelled something. Stracciatella is an Italian egg-drop soup, which derives its name from the Italian word stracciato meaning “torn apart.” Stracciatella soup is made by boiling a broth and then slowly pouring a raw egg mixture into it. When the egg mixture hits the hot broth, it forms stracciatelle or “little shreds” of cooked egg in the broth.

As egg drop soup is nothing like gelato, I was certain that either Google or I had made a mistake (Google is always right, so I blamed myself and some clumsy typing). But then, I kept prowling the web until I got an explanation as to why egg drop soup and gelato share a name.

Stracciatella gelato typically has a vanilla base and small bits of chocolate in the gelato. However, to make stracciatella, chocolate bits are just not added to the gelato and then mixed in. Rather, gelato geniuses developed a technique where they pour a thin continuous stream of melted chocolate into the cold vanilla gelato while churning it. When the hot chocolate hits the cold gelato, the sudden change in temperature causes the chocolate to get “torn apart” into small bits of chocolate that are dispersed throughout the gelato. So the soup and the delicious dessert share a name because the two dishes share a preparation technique.

GiGi’s stracciatella was delicious, but after doing this research, I really want to watch stracciatella be made. Perhaps that can be a side quest.