Granita and Brioche: Breakfast in Eastern Sicily

Granita is a semi-frozen Sicilian dessert made of water, sugar and one flavoring, frozen slowly while it is stirred so that it never sets into a solid block. In eastern Sicily it is breakfast. From spring to autumn, people stop at a counter on the way to work, order a glass of granita and a brioche, dip one into the other and eat it standing up, at eight in the morning, as a normal thing to do.

What is granita?

Three ingredients and a technique. Water, sugar, and the flavor: almond, lemon, coffee, mulberry, pistachio, chocolate, strawberry, peach. No cream in the mixture itself, no eggs, and in the good versions no artificial flavoring, since a proper almond granita is made from almond paste and a lemon one from lemons.

The technique is what makes it. The mixture is frozen while being agitated, so ice crystals form small and separate rather than fusing. The result should be pourable, slightly grainy on the tongue, and it should melt cleanly instead of turning to slush.

The Sicilian granita is on the national list of traditional Italian food products kept by the Ministry of Agriculture, which is a register of preparations made the same way in the same area for at least twenty-five years.

Is granita the same as a sorbet, or as shaved ice?

No to both, and the differences are worth knowing before you order.

Sorbet is churned harder and holds more air, which gives it a smoother, lighter, more uniform texture, closer to an ice cream without dairy. Granita has less air and a coarser structure by design.

Shaved ice, the American and Japanese kind, is ice frozen solid and then scraped, with the syrup poured over it afterward. In a granita the flavor is frozen into the water from the start, which is why the taste is even from the first spoon to the last rather than concentrated at the top.

There are also regional textures inside Sicily. Around Messina the granita is softer, almost drinkable. In the Catania area it holds more shape. Both are correct and locals will tell you the other one is not.

Do Italians really eat granita for breakfast?

Sicilians do, in the east of the island, in the warm months, and the rest of Italy finds it as surprising as you do.

It works because it is not sweet in the way an American breakfast pastry is sweet. Almond granita with a plain brioche is close to a cold breakfast of bread and milk. Coffee granita with cream is a cold espresso and a croissant. Nobody in Catania considers it a dessert before noon.

The season runs roughly from April to October, and outside it most bars stop making granita altogether, which is the thing to know if you are coming in winter. Our guide to the best time to visit Sicily covers what else changes with the months.

The brioche col tuppo

The bread that comes with it is a soft, slightly sweet, egg and butter bun with a small ball of dough on top. The name comes from the tuppo, the low chignon Sicilian women used to wear, which the top knot is said to resemble.

You do not eat it separately. You break off pieces and dip them into the granita, or you tear off the top knot first and use it as a spoon. Ordering a granita without a brioche is allowed, and marks you out immediately.

Which flavors are the real ones

The traditional list is short: almond, coffee, chocolate, lemon, strawberry, peach, pistachio and mulberry.

Three of them tell you where you are. Almond, made from Sicilian almond paste, is the classic breakfast flavor and the benchmark for a good bar. Mulberry, gelsi, is dark, tart and available for only a few weeks in early summer when the black mulberries are ripe, which is why finding it is a small event. Coffee, usually served with a layer of whipped cream under and over it, is the one Sicilians order in the afternoon.

Pistachio is real when it is made from the pistachios of Bronte, grown on the lava soil on the northwestern slope of Etna. It is expensive, and the bright green versions that cost the same as lemon are not made from them.

Snow from a volcano

The technique predates refrigeration by a thousand years, and it starts on Etna.

The Arabs, who ruled Sicily from the ninth century, brought the sharbat, a drink cooled with ice and flavored with fruit and flower syrups, which is the ancestor of granita, sorbet and ice cream alike. The ice came from the mountain. Through the winter, men called nivaroli collected snow on the upper slopes of Etna and packed it into neviere, stone-lined pits and caves where it survived until summer, and then carried it down to the towns and sold it.

The trade lasted into the twentieth century. What is now a two euro breakfast was, for centuries, a luxury built on an industry of men carrying snow down a volcano in the dark.

How it is made

Two ways, and you can taste the difference.

The old way is a pozzetto, a metal cylinder set in a bath of ice and salt, scraped and stirred by hand as it freezes. It gives an uneven, living texture that changes as the glass warms up.

The modern way is a machine that freezes and scrapes continuously, which is consistent and fast and slightly flatter. Most bars use a machine, a few in Catania and Acireale still use a pozzetto, and in the ones that do, the granita is usually gone by noon.

At home, the method that works without equipment is to freeze the mixture in a shallow tray and rake it with a fork every half hour until it is grainy. It will not be a Sicilian granita, but it will be closer than anything you can buy in an American supermarket.

Granita outside Sicily

The name travels badly. In the rest of Italy granita often means crushed ice with syrup poured over it, sold from a cart. In the United States it turns up as Italian ice, which is sweeter and denser, and as a slushie, which is a different thing entirely. What is served in Catania has more in common with a good sorbet than with any of them.

Where to have it

Anywhere with a queue of Sicilians at eight in the morning. The good bars are unremarkable to look at, they make a handful of flavors well, and they will not have a photograph of the granita outside.

The east coast is granita country: Catania, Acireale, the towns around Etna, Messina, Taormina, Syracuse. Our guide to Catania's fish market and street food covers the rest of what to eat in a morning there, and our guide to what to eat in eastern Sicily covers the rest of the day. For the sweets that come later, cassata and cannoli and marzipan fruit, we wrote a separate guide.

On our journeys

Our Sicilian journeys start from Taormina and spend their mornings in market towns and their afternoons on Etna and in the Hyblaean countryside, which means granita happens naturally rather than as an item on a list. The Amber route ends in Catania, at the fish market and in the street food of the old town; details and dates are on the page.

If you want a trip built around what people actually eat here rather than around restaurants, tell us in Design your trip.