My panna cotta experience...

See recipe here. Keep reading on my thoughts on the recipe.

So my history with panna cotta started with when one of my friends from high school came to visit from Houston about 1.5 years ago. She was an exchange student in Italy for ... I guess a semester; therefore, a self proclaimed expert on Italian food apparently. Sorry, being a food snob myself that totally got on my nerve, especially knowing she doesn't cook at all on regular basis. Anyway, so we were at Fritti, my favorite pizza place in town. After arguing about whether to put prosciutto on every one of their specially designed pizza, we managed to have a civilized dinner till when it comes time for dessert. I've always heard of panna cotta, but at the time I just didn't recall right away what it is so I asked the usual question, What's panna cotta? She, snobbishly, answered "Oh! You don't know what panna cotta is? You've never had panna cotta! Gah! You have been missing out! I've had the BEST panna cotta when I was in Italy" blah blah blah... Those may not be the exact words but that's how it is in my mind at least. Anyway, turned out they ran out of the panna cotta that night so we never got it.

So of course I looked up what panna cotta is afterward and realize it's really just an egg-less custard, milky, made solid by putting in either gelatin or other such ingredient. BLAH!! WHATEVER!! I make honestly one of the best flan (an eggy custard) from scratch and this is NOTHING!! It's about as good as a kiddy dessert (think Jello) with a fancy Italian name.

Anyway, I was watching Barefoot Contessa the other day and saw this recipe and finally decide it's time for me to really try making this dessert and judge for myself how I feel about it. After cross referencing quite a few recipes, which are more or less the same, I made the panna cotta following pretty much exactly Ina's recipe. While it's not bad at all, sweet, creamy, vanilla flavored, it's nothing to write home about, and in fact WAY too creamy and fatty for my taste, also my waistline. If I were to make it again, I would use only half if not 1/4 of the heavy cream it calls for and substitute the rest with milk. I wanna say 2% but I am sure Chris would prefer whole milk. I also made the recipe using this vanilla bean paste thingy instead of real vanilla bean, which turns out great. It's my first time trying the vanilla bean paste and it gives exactly the same visual appearance of the tiny little black vanilla seeds and it's completely awesome, much more convenient than using regular vanilla beans to be honest.

So... the conclusion is... that Panna Cotta is just a simple Italian dessert with a fancy name. It could be nice if I had adjusted the recipe to my own taste, and I am glad I finally made it and I will make it again for sure. I enjoy food, cooking, fashion, and various nice things whether it is simple or uber fancy. Being able to make some of these things in my own kitchen makes me happy and feeling empowered. I hate it when people put things in a way that is unapproachable and can only be found somewhere in their distant memory, located in exotic location, as if you will never have it, let alone making it urself. Now that's snobbish, not good taste.