Most creative affogato ever? Portola contends for the title with its Wafflegato

Every once in a while I’ll order an affogato. The last few have been at a great gelato shop called Pitango just a few steps from the Baltimore Harbor in Fells Point. I’m stuck in a delicious rut: cardamom gelato with a double shot of Counter Culture’s Toscana pulled on top using a 2-group Faema. Highly recommended.





So, given my affection for this sort of treat, I read about Portola’s wafflegato* with great interest. Introduced last Friday, the lab’s clever take on the affogato was apparently a big success. Here’s a diagram/recipe for the curious:





I think the Dauphinoise (cheese mixture) was incorporated into the gelato; feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken, Orange Countians.





Looks tasty, right? Love the addition of smoked sea salt. I’m guessing I’d use the waffle like a spoon when eating this—at least until the “spoon,” itself, had been consumed.





My impression is that variations on this theme are expected. Sounds good to me. As a self-proclaimed foodie, I’m glad to have become familiar with Portola, home of a chartreuse Slayer. The one coffee I’ve tried of theirs was well-roasted, a great “comfort food” dry-processed Brazil. I’m enjoying Portola’s quirky updates on Facebook, too.





*Note for the amateur linguists: -gato is a cranberry morpheme, i.e. part of a word (affogato, past participle of the Italian verb affogare “to drown”) that’s made to stand for the whole in new compounds despite its own semantic opacity. Other examples are cran- (cran-grape), -palooza (LEGO-palooza, salsa-palooza), -zilla (blogzilla, bridezilla), and -gate (tattoo-gate, bounty-gate). It remains to be seen whether or not -gato will ultimately become productive. I can think of a few tokens I’d like to introduce, i.e. Biscoffgato, nougato, chocogato.



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