Writing about food, ancient or trend setting ingredients, food processing machinery, producers, importers, distributors, retailers, foodies, food fans, food specialists, pastry chefs, cakes, sweets, candies, ice creams, or cookies, can be at times challenging, even for one like me, who has written and followed the food-culinary world for over 10 years. However, it remains always interesting if one can report on how the international food market presents and elaborates its novelties. In this case, for a food writer and blogger, it is not so much about money or goodies, as about what is being offered by those who gather around a specialized convention and how, those involved, bring forth, elaborate, process and prepare specialties with those ingredients which nature has provided us.

Take my latest discovery during this past 2024 SIGEP (Salone Internazionale Gelateria, Pasticceria, Panificazione Artigianale e Caffe’); it induced me to remember the history of the discovery of the Americas, with Cristopher Columbus, the Spanish Conquistadors, and those first cacao beans which in 15152 were first shipped by the Spanish Hernan Cortes to King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Of course, I assume that those early cacao beans, shipped to the King and Emperor, probably in large bags, were first processed and roasted after being removed from their “cabossas,” and freed from their milky “placenta” in which the cacao nuts were cradled in. While the cacao beans were usually roasted and sent dry or reduced in cacao blocks after being milled on stone “metates” and made to dry to reach the solid state.

Since that first shipment of cacao beans, almost 500 years have past. Cacao beans travelled then from the New World to the Old World; moved on to Europe and beyond. Then, here and there, over centuries, cacao beverages, made from either criollo or forestero cacao beans, with or without sugar from cane syrup, restored the nobles, the spoiled, the weary, the tired, the travelers, the gluttons, the religious and the pagans. Later, those precious cacao beans, roasted and milled under a source of heat, freed from the excess of cacao butter, and processed in 1795 by Mr. Fry’s steam chocolate processing machine turned into English chocolate bars; then those “nuts” without their “placenta” were turned into powder with Caspardus Van Houten who in 1806 invented a new hydraulic press for milling and removing cacao butter; finally chocolate bits were turned into the sweet rich famous glaze and ingredient for the scrumptious Original Sacher Torte still served today in Vienna, Austria.

And what has this cacao beans and chocolate story to do with Rimini’s SIGEP’s Convention? Well, well…more sweet related news. Instead of tossing the fresh pulp around the valuable cacao beans a new eco-sustainable food industry has reinvented a good delicious product for cacao and chocolate lovers.

In the end, to find out who has began preparing cakes with this novelty cacao cabossa pulp, I also visited Hall B 5 stand 073 where Pastry Master Chef Loris Oss Emer was very busy making a cake with the new product provided by Menz & Gasser of Novaledo near Trento in Northern Italy. Don’t ask me therefore where I stopped with enthusiasm while SIGEP 2024 unfolded over 4 days! I have a sweet tooth, and I am a cake and ice cream fan, so you can guess!

As the Convention ended, I looked for a nice place to dine on Mediterranean fish and seafood, not far from the Convention Fiera Center. In Rivabella Rimini, I found the Ristorante Pizzeria CAVALIERI SPIAGGIA, owned by a young couple, who serves wonderful warm or cold fish antipasti, well prepared grilled seafood “spiedini” and grilled fish filets and a white sparkling “vino della casa.” Theirs was a friendly service in a family style clean and seemingly popular place, absolutely not overpriced, with at the end of the meal, a complimentary little glass of limoncello. I will be back next year folks! I would suggest you try it out too!

CAVALIERI RISTORANTE SPIAGGIA PIZZERIA Via Toscanelli, 50 – 47923 Rivabella di Rimini, Tel. 0541.386506 – Fax 0541.57630 – Cell. 328.271 6091 – http://www.ristorantecavalierispiaggia.com or info@ristorantecavalierispiaggia.com