DaRò is the desire to introduce you to a new idea of ​​simple, good and positive nutrition also through the history of producers and business realities that work in compliance with tradition and in the search for excellent ingredients without giving up the idea of ​​innovating.

Among the companies of excellence in the Apulian territory we find Arneo (www.arneo.it), an active reality in the field of artisan ice cream: DaRò interviewed Ernesto Costanza (sales manager), Marianna Costanza (production manager) and Dino Vetrano (pastry chef), to tell you about their ethical and innovative project that has its roots in a long family history of master ice cream makers and in the solid lands of Salento culture.
 

How did Arneo's passion for natural ice cream come about?
Arneo was born from the will of three people who wanted to share a project to remain romantically united. We built this project by putting together our identities and our experiences and the ice cream shop is an integral part of the family history of one of us, a beautiful story full of values ​​and taste. Beautiful things must be preserved and we started from ice cream, but we brought our intolerances, our taste and our ethical reserves and the belief that it is possible to enhance the palate in full respect of health and sustainability. We thought of a traditional ice cream that would respond to the needs of consumers aware of the importance of proper nutrition.

What are the characteristics that distinguish your ice cream?
Ours is a vegetable-based artisan ice cream, therefore without milk, cream and other animal derivatives, produced in a laboratory dedicated to the production of gluten-free products to prevent contamination of the ice cream. We almost exclusively produce single-portion Spumoni packaged in a traditional way and we offer them mainly to the world of catering, obviously to catering attentive to its customers and eager to satisfy the needs of an audience increasingly interested in conscious consumption and increasingly interested in the problem. food intolerance.

Your product does not contain gluten or lactose and uses extra virgin olive oil. It therefore meets the nutritional needs of a market in continuous growth, that of food intolerances. How come this choice?
The growing onset of phenomena of food intolerance has been experienced as personal experience for us and the spread of the phenomenon is increasingly evident. I personally am lactose intolerant and I have often had to watch others eat succulent sweets while eating a fruit salad. Our spumone wants to break down this wall: you can eat healthily without giving up pleasure and without excluding anyone. With regard to the extra virgin olive oil in the recipe it is for two reasons: one technical and namely to compensate for vegetable fats with the lack of those present in milk, cream and butter, and one identity, the olive tree is for us the horizon of our culture.

How do you select the ingredients and study the combinations for the production of your ice creams?
The traditional cow's milk ice cream is an amazing traditional Italian dessert, a creamy, fresh dessert with an unmistakable milk aftertaste. Our ice cream is a creamy dessert full of the flavors of the raw materials with which it is made. This makes the choice of raw materials essential because the ice cream will have the flavor of what you put in it without the flavor of milk can somehow cover its flavor. In addition, we are fortunate to live in an area that provides us with an enormous quantity of raw materials and passionate and scrupulous small producers. I give an example. To produce our dried fig ice cream, we have selected a local producer who controls the drying and preservation process in an exemplary way which allows us to have a raw material that preserves all its aromas and flavors.

Salento is the land of Lecce's Pasticciotto and Spumone. What are the differences between the two specialties?
Pasticciotto is a pastry product based on shortcrust pastry filled with custard, increasingly known by consumers all over the world as a typical Salento product. Lo Spumone is an ice cream with a characteristic shape of a small dome and despite being equally widespread in ice cream parlors throughout Salento, it has not yet received the right attention. Actually, making this cake following the artisan process is very expensive, the whole production process is done by hand and requires numerous steps. Our ambition is to make this traditional dessert known to the largest number of people.

What are the plans for the future of the Arneo Artisan Cremeria?
Ours is a continuous challenge to carry out a project that in its entirety is very ambitious: we have the urgency to make our production process more sustainable by reducing the impact of the energy we use to refrigerate, with the use of solar panels; we would like to testify more and more clearly that the production of cow's milk is an unnecessarily cruel practice and its excessive and indiscriminate consumption is not healthy; we also want to deepen our identity focused on the re-evaluation of small sustainable productions integrated into the territory, attentive to tradition, quality and well-being.

Where can we find (and taste) your ice cream?
You can taste Arneo spumone (and other delicious flavors) in some restaurants in Salento, Valle d'Itria and also in the Bari area. We also set up a small tasting room at our laboratory in Lecce in via Premuda 20, where we hope many of you will come.

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