Cheese bread with berry and dried fruit muesli

Ferran Adrià’s work as an inventor of impossible methods has been so grand and so prolific that to speculate over which is the most transcendent technological formula created in his long career is not unlike trying to identify the sex of an angel. Is it last year’s melon caviar, mango sphere or two-meter spaghetti …, to name only three examples in an endless list of exceptional culinary advances? All of these may have been surpassed by this ice cream, which we take the liberty to proclaim the best in history, and with great fanfare. For the extent of its radical, unexpected shift in consistency and thermic sensation is so great that it constitutes a new kind of ice cream.

Is it better or worse than Adrià’s masterpieces of 2003? For us this is a rhetorical question—there is no adequate response to whether in 2004 the already unbeatable 2003 level was surpassed. We would like to recognize it with just one testimonial, at the request of Ferran himself—in fairness we really should have awarded him three or four Dishes of the Year. This ice cream is the apex.

An ice cream as light as air and extremely fragile, with a Parmesan flavor practically equal to the cheese and an irreverently industrial terrine shape, cool in temperature rather than cold, offers us the most fleeting and temperature-neutral way to experience the ice cream of a thousand flavors, of a thousand fruits confits, the Casatta.

How is it made? A Parmesan liquid is emulsified until fluffy as air, then frozen. This produces an ice cream that falls just short of levitating off the plate, with tiny fruit accents.