The Italian Ice Cream Sandwich You Can Also Eat For Breakfast

When you realize that eating ice cream sandwiches for breakfast is not only common, but supremely logical in Sicily, Italy, it's likely that you'll regret, at least for a few minutes, that you weren't born on an island near the tip of the Big Boot. Known as "brioche con gelato," these ice cream sandwiches forgo the cookies that form the base and the lid of the American ice cream sandwich, and instead, substitute a puff-topped brioche bun in the cookies' place.

Fortunately, the switcheroo isn't as illogical as it seems. Although it's often used as a hamburger bun on this side of the Pond, brioche is more of a sweet bread. It falls into the category of pastry breads called "Viennoiserie," and boasts cream, egg, butter, and most importantly for our purposes here, sugar as ingredients. It's kinda like a fluffy scone, only with fewer flakes on the crust.

While its sweetness may just be the ticket to achieving that perfect mix of umami and saccharine when you're cooking your favorite hamburger recipe, it also makes the bread an excellent candidate for a Sicilian-style ice cream sandwich. And given that in that part of the Mediterranean, it gets up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter in the summertime, the Sicilians, in their infinite wisdom, figured out a way to not only work in an Italian sweet treat — gelato — into breakfast, but to beat the morning heat at the same time. 

It's a simple process to make one of these sweet sandwiches. The sandwich consists of gelato — often hazelnut or pistachio. However, cannoli and tiramisu, as well as stracciatella, also make up the flavor offerings. The Sicilians slice open a special brioche roll and slide a couple of scoops in between the two slices of bread. 

The ice cream sandwich brioche is a bit different from normal brioche. It's brioche col tuppo. It has a little puffed-up top, which people like to pull off the sammy and dip into their gelato before diving into the rest. But luckily, the brioche buns that your local grocery store carries will work just fine. Although brioche is waaay yummy, it does have a drawback. It's more fragile than the cookies American ice cream sandwich makers use to make the sweet treat. However, toasting the bun with a little butter, maybe even some honey brown butter, like Black & Bolyard's infused spread, stiffens up the bread, making it sturdy enough to hold your gelato.

Finally, some enterprising brioche con gelato makers on this side of the Atlantic have even gone as far as using a toasted pretzel roll instead of brioche. This, they stuff with enterprising flavors like buttered popcorn-sriracha ice cream. This mash-up suggests that this traditional Sicilian breakfast food is open for interpretation. Who knows? Maybe homemade ice cream or even frozen yogurt with assorted toppings stuffed between slices of pretzel roll will become your favorite "IT" breakfast next summer.