You’d have to be crazy to try ham and pineapple ice cream, and even crazier to make it. Well, we found someone just crazy enough to do it and do it well, and that’s Crazy Ice. Their ice cream is produced using the finest ingredients obsessively researched and sourced from specific parts of Italy, and in the case of ham and pineapple, pre-cooked to get the flavour from the meat. It tasted exactly like the pizza topping, even the texture remained, resulting in confusion as to what that stringy thing was you had stuck in your teeth. Wow.
Other flavours we tasted were goat’s cheese honey and white truffle, even GORGONZOLA, which was at first unsettling but so real and intriguing it tasted incredible. Violet, a magical purple colour, tasted exactly like you would imagine the flower would. Salted chocolate was a surprise, although it was strange to be left feeling thirsty after eating an ice cream.
The business is owned by one man, Emanuale Massarani who started Crazy Ice 11 years ago with no knowledge of how to make ice cream, self taught and using machines sold to him by his father, the first creation was tomato and basil.
They are open from 9am to 12pm everyday and until 1am on Fridays and Saturdays showing their absolute dedication to the craft. There are no artificial colours or flavourings, the classic strawberry flavour consisting of 50% strawberries.
Typical Italian culinary craftsmanship and good ingredients well cooked, are combined with the desire to produce something different and the imagination to deliver. Emanuale takes great pride in his work, having created nearly 300 flavours and counting.
Perfect and honest creation of the flavours, of which you are very familiar with, but textures and temperatures that you are not. But it all makes sense, the eccentricity of the creations are grounded by the Crazy Ice shop which looks like any other in Milan and the refreshingly honest name, not masquerading under a clever pseudonym or suggestive word. They make crazy ice cream so they are called Crazy Ice.
I hope next year they make chair flavoured ice cream for the Salone, or Tom Dixon flavour, there’d be loads of it. You couldn’t order just one scoop it’d have to be sold by the litre and it’d come with a press pack served in a round bag with a Zona Tortona flier for a wafer and a USB stick for a spoon, and a free daily publication sponsored by the British Design Embassy printed napkin size to wipe the corners of your mouth on and then an Ikea lamp outside the shop to put it all in when you’re done.
I’d like to thank Mr Emanuale Massarani and his father Marco for their time.
Images: Ed Vince
Words: Ed Vince & David Wilson