Gabriele Marangoni’s tiramisu features savoiardi finger biscuits soaked in coffee and amaretto liqueur, Amaretti biscuits, and two layers of mascarpone custard, with coffee beans and a light cocoa dusting on top – RICKY WILSON / STUFF
Tiramisu might now be one of Gabriele Marangoni’s signature dishes, but for the Italian chef, eating it is “not really a childhood memory”.
It’s not that tiramisu didn’t feature when he was growing up in Bologna, Italy; there was plenty of it in fact – sponge cake laden with cream and chocolate chips, and soaked through with coffee and liqueur.
So much liqueur, in fact, that the dessert was deemed unsuitable for children until they were aged around 14 or 15.
By that point, Marangoni was already in the kitchen himself. His mum was a chef and he’d started working in the restaurant at 12, cleaning mussels “because I had small hands”.
“Nowadays it would be child labour, but back in the day it was fine!”
As he moved through hospitality school – followed by a stint in the European Parliament canteen in Strasbourg, making sandwiches in Rotterdam, and then back to Bologna – he started playing around with his own versions of tiramisu.
There was a limoncello tiramisu, a strawberry tiramisu – all sorts of twists – although the one that’s now his favourite came about by accident.
“One day we finished the ladyfinger [biscuits, which were commonly used to make tiramisu], and I said ‘let’s use the Amaretti’,” recalls Marangoni.
“And since then I’ve done it with Amaretti, because everybody loved it, you know. So that’s my way, I like it that way, I think it’s a much more elegant approach to the tiramisu.”
