Recipe from the Coffee Window: Pure Black Velvet

Recipe: Pure Black Velvet

It’s inevitable that our Pure Black cold-pressed bottled coffee would end up in the same glass with gelato from Capogiro because they’re both well suited for this ridiculously hot weather, and they’re both made in the great city of Philadelphia. Our friend Stephanie Reitano is the gelato artisan behind Capogiro (in Italian, this word means when something is so good, it makes your head spin) and she pays attention to every detail. Stephanie makes Northern regional “Veneto” style (with mostly milk or a tiny bit of cream and occasionally egg yolk thickeners) because that geography matches our locale in climate and agriculture, and she uses milk from a closed herd of grass-fed Scottish Ayreshire Cows. Her flavors are always rich and real and rotate through the seasons with some of the best combinations coming during the autumn harvest and Thanksgiving season (we remember cool weather fondly) when she makes her Lancaster Country Pear with Wild Turkey and Sweet Potato with Pecan Praline and Pomegranate.

Stephanie is a great example of the most valuable kitchen skill anyone can have—the ability to layer ingredients. To create a good recipe–whether short or long, savory or sweet–you need to understand how to work with complimentary as well as contrasting flavors. It took us a few tries to find the perfect combination in our Pure Black Velvet, but what you’ll get in this glass is smooth amalgamation of three inherently (slightly) bitter ingredients that work together to mellow each other out. Drink it fast before steamy summer has its way with it.

Recipe
It’s this simple:
Pour 1 part cold Pure Black to 2 parts cold Guinness into a chilled jumbo-sized glass and then add a big scoop of dark chocolate gelato, from Capogrio if you’re lucky. Swirl and drink.