MEDIA: BROADSHEET
Published on 29 October 2018
by PILAR MITCHELL
There’s no one correct way to eat cannoli – it’s up to personal preference. “Some people like them fresh; others somewhere in-between soft and crisp [after] sitting in the fridge for a little while,” says Giuseppe Caruso, owner of Pasticceria Caruso and the bakery’s new food truck.
How it should be made though is a precise art form. “When it’s fresh, it should have a nice, buttery crunch,” he says. “The shell will have a bubbly texture and the filling has to complement the shell.”
He should know – at Caruso’s Wetherill Park factory Caruso and his team make 3500 cannolis each week, supplying the storefront, wholesaling to shops and making shells and fillings for the black 1970s campervan he’s rigged up to serve the Italian sweet at festivals and events around Sydney’s west.
The cannolis are made-to-order in the truck. “We take the shells and custard on board and fill as we go,” says Caruso. Through the large service window you can see staff piping cannoli, filling the crisp shells from one side and then the other, finishing with a downward flick of the wrist to achieve a tidy end on the custard.
While the bricks-and-mortar shop offers a bunch of flavours, the truck generally carries six. There’s chocolate, ricotta and vanilla, plus two or three special flavours such as coffee, limoncello, and blueberry and ricotta.
Caruso claims mobile Pasticceria Caruso Cannoli venture is Australia’s first dedicated cannoli truck and after a quick online search he seems correct.
It took two years for him to find the perfect vehicle; he finally settled on a 1979 campervan. “I’m a perfectionist; I didn’t want to get a body built on the back of a truck, I wanted to get something with a bit of character, and what I found is short, fat and cute, like me,” he says, laughing.
Caruso debuted the truck at Park Feast in Bella Vista in September. “It was a smash hit. We sold out quite early and had to make a dash back to the factory to get more shells and filling,” he says.
Caruso, who has been running the pasticceria for a decade, enjoyed fame with his bazooka cannoli – an oversized shell filled with as many as 50 mini cannolis. “We did really well out of the bazooka cannoli and I wanted to try something new,” he says. “I thought, ‘Why don’t I build a food truck and go out and give cannoli to the masses?’” he says.
Why not indeed.
Read the original article here: https://www.broadsheet.com.au/sydney/food-and-drink/article/australias-first-cannoli-truck-now-rolling-around-sydneys-streets
