STRAWBERRY STRACCIATELLA ICE CREAM.

Heat and heat and heat and rows and rows and rows of soft serve ice cream machines. The streets of Avignon, France were a convection oven, circulating 100º air in and around honking cars, cursing pedestrians, centuries-old building facades. Everything was old, and beautiful, and sweaty. Which is where the ice cream came in. Flavors my twenty year-old brain had never imagined before: licorice, pink grapefruit, bacio, amarena, gianduja, all dispensed from gleaming, golden soft serve machines.

It was the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college, and my friend Julie and I were there to study and attend the Festival D’Avignon—Europe’s biggest theatre and dance festival. In true French fashion, the performers went en grève (on strike) that season, and we were left to our own devices of ice cream eating and ancient city exploration. The days were sticky with a rainbow of melted soft serve and the wilted efforts of a few performers still willing to go on stage.

But amidst the heat and the masses of people and the art, there was an intensity of flavor people in Avignon seemed accustomed to that I’d never experienced before. Ripe, fresh tomatoes. Tiny, perfect fraises de bois (forest strawberries). Basil. Anise. These weren’t easy tastes on the palate—nobody in America was even thinking of eating licorice ice cream in 2003. The flavors here were about more than comfort. They were about the experience and the history of the ingredients. Even the soft serve could tell a story.

It’s been eleven years since I was in Europe. The last time, my friends Ben and Elliot and I rented an apartment in Paris up a dark, warm, stale-aired staircase. We locked ourselves out just before we had to go to the airport (I say we, but really it was Elliot’s fault, right Elliot?) and it was left to me to use the necessarily sufficient French I’d learned over the past four years to call a locksmith and get us in. We raced to Charles de Gaulle, breathless and sweaty and full of a sense that anything was possible. I don’t remember which arrondissement we stayed in, or much else besides that feeling of freedom, capability, owning the world.

We graduated six weeks later. Eighteen months later, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. And eighteen months after that, she died. My world became suddenly, necessarily small. Everything seemed terrifying. The thought of leaving the country was daunting, irreconcilable with how powerless I felt. I couldn’t control the way anything went, so why would I consciously put myself so far from the known? I spent the years after that tending to my grief, immured in a world full of the recognizable.

This Sunday is Father’s Day, and the eight year anniversary of my mother’s death. In the past year, my desire to travel beyond the U.S. has begun to return. I can feel myself opening to the possibility, the excitement—a flower slowly unfurling itself toward a sun that’s always been there.

For now, for the past decade, I’ve found ways to celebrate flavor at home: My favorite rich, dense Scharffen Berger chocolate. The summer’s brightest strawberries. Vanilla bean. A touch of balsamic.

I turned to Scharffen Berger to make this strawberry stracciatella because of the chocolate’s subtlety and smoothness—the company was co-founded by a chocolate connoisseur and a winemaker, resulting in a bean-to-bar product that’s exquisitely refined. Drizzled into a cool bath of roasted strawberry ice cream, the melted 70% Cacao Dark Chocolate Baking Bar hardens in perfect, bittersweet streaks.

Like any good trip somewhere beautiful and unknown, this ice cream is complex, luscious, and not overly sweet—the flavors speak for themselves in lovely harmony. Make it yourself, and don’t forget to share on social media, tagging @kaleandcaramel and @scharffenberger.