Gelateria Naia

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We are often asked how we come up with all of our flavors. The inspiration comes from many places, dinner out at a restaurant, seeing a product in a grocery store, even a regular cookbook. Our favorite inspiration comes from when we meet another local food artisan and collaborate on a flavor or two. Our first collaboration was with John Scharffenberger at Scharffen Berger Chocolates back in 2004. More recent collaborations include working with James Freeman at Blue Bottle Coffee, Michael Recchiuti at Recchiuti Confections, the team at TCHO Chocolates and Ahmed Raheem at Numi Tea. The second tasting at Semifreddi's was used to pick the final recipes for the new flavors. Finally, we got all the Cinnamon Twist Bread, Biscotti and other ingredients we would need and got down to business. On a sunny and hot Friday Cinnamon Twist Gelato hit our stores, and sold out. Now Biscotti is there, too, and soon it will be followed by more Semifreddi's surprises. Last weekend we visited one of our favorite farms, CMC Farms, located about ten miles west of Fresno. You may have noticed CMC Farms at various certified farmers' markets ; they have a unique offering of grapes, citrus, stone fruit and nuts, displaying the passion that Cruz and Manas ( and Children: CMC ) Saghdejian have about their own fruit. Our favorite crop from CMC are their Early Wonderful varietal pomegranates in the fall. Vartan, the youngest of the Saghdejian children, takes his job as farmer and salesman very seriously, and met us out on their second generation family farm to discuss the 2010 crop and show us the care they put into their fruit. Vartan showed us how well organized the farm and the trees and vines are, allowing seven full-time workers on average at the farm to plant and harvest fruit. We talked about how important the certified in certified farmers' markets is, and the business of retail, wholesale and the role of the fruit packers. We discussed the conspicuous Dust Bowl signs posted by larger macrofarmers along the I-5 corridor, its associated politics, and effects of current events on the working and economic conditions at the farms. It was encouraging that even amidst the times, a small well-run passionate family farm can survive and thrive. We are always happy to be serving up some new flavors. After our very successful ( and very crowded ) public tasting, we narrowed down our selection and are proud to offer flavors we recently developed along with fellow artisan producers here in the Bay Area. For our Blue Bottle Coffee flavor we created not only a new flavor but a whole new method for making coffee gelato. James Freeman sat down with us to discuss what is different about Blue Bottle Coffee and we had a cupping of several coffees. A day later, in our own kitchen, we decided that a cold press method of making coffee would make a delicious cup of gelato. And it does. When we met Michael Recchiuti we knew we would like him because one of the first things he said to us was, You should come by our kitchen and have some chocolate. We spent several hours tasting chocolate, discussing gelato and working out ideas for a few Recchiuti flavors of gelato. Our stores are now selling the result of that, and several other conversations, Recchiuti Chocolate & Malt. We have several new flavors in the works as well, but we like to take our time so Michael will keep inviting us back.