Panna cotta

Cream, sugar, and just enough gelatine to hold it. That is the whole dish, and the entire difficulty is in the word "just".

Not in Artusi, and not old. Panna cotta as we know it is a twentieth-century Piedmontese dessert; the stories attaching it to a nineteenth-century Hungarian woman in the Langhe are repeated confidently everywhere and supported nowhere.

Ingredients

Makes 4.

	Metric	Imperial
Double or heavy cream	500 ml	17 fl oz
Caster sugar	60 g	2 oz
Leaf gelatine	5 g, about 2.5 sheets	0.18 oz
Vanilla pod	1	1

Five grams of gelatine to half a litre of cream is deliberately low. It will barely stand. That is the point.

Method

1. Soak the gelatine leaves in cold water until floppy, about five minutes.
2. Warm the cream with the sugar and the split vanilla pod until it steams. Do not let it boil.
3. Take it off the heat. Squeeze the water out of the gelatine and stir it into the hot cream until it has completely dissolved.
4. Pass it through a sieve into a jug, which catches any undissolved gelatine and the vanilla pod.
5. Pour into moulds. Chill at least four hours, better overnight.
6. To turn out, dip the mould in hot water for three seconds, no more, and invert onto a plate.

What goes wrong

It is rubbery. Too much gelatine. This is the standard fault of written recipes, because a firmer set survives being turned out and photographed. Reducing it is the single change that most improves the dish.

It will not come out of the mould. Too little gelatine for that shape, or too short a chill. Serve it in the glass instead, which is what most of Piedmont does anyway.

There are threads in it. The gelatine met liquid that was too hot, or was not stirred until fully dissolved. The sieve catches this, which is why the sieve is in the method.

Why it works

Gelatine sets by forming a loose protein mesh that traps liquid. Below roughly 1 per cent by weight that mesh is weak enough to collapse in the mouth almost immediately, which reads as creaminess rather than as jelly. Above about 2 per cent it behaves like a gummy sweet. The whole recipe lives in that gap.

At the table

A dolce, served cold, in a small portion. Piedmont is its home and it spread because it is easy, cheap and keeps for a day, which is also how it became the default dessert on menus that have stopped thinking.

That is worth knowing when you order one. A good panna cotta is a real thing and a bad one is a supermarket tub, and the tell is the wobble: it should barely hold its shape when the plate is moved, and a firm dome that stands up on its own has had gelatine added to survive handling rather than to set.

Fruit coulis, caramel or nothing at all. Berries in winter are a sign the kitchen is buying frozen and not thinking about it.

Coffee comes after it, never with it, and the coffee is an espresso. There is more about that in the coffee guide, including what happens if you ask for a cappuccino at the end of a meal.

A dessert wine is common in Piedmont: moscato, cold, sweet and lightly sparkling.

What an Italian would say

That it is Piedmontese and not Tuscan, whatever a menu in Florence claims. That the fruit coulis is optional and the caramel is a different dessert entirely. And that if it holds a sharp edge when you cut it, somebody was afraid of it falling over.