Into the Italian Recipe Books - Biscotti di Pinoli

Biscotti di Pinoli go with vino or caffè. The cookie in front is shown bottom
side up. Backdrop is a tufa stone wall, common in Civita.

Tony, our resident architect here in Civita, is an excellent cook. His kitchen sports two encyclopedic series on Italian cooking I could only wish to find for myself. They are limited editions, and no one in all of Italy seems to be selling theirs.

One volume is dedicated to piccola pasticceria, or small dessert things, which include cookies, tarts, filled eclair-type pastries and fried pastries. Based on the photos, I selected a recipe for Biscotti di Pinoli.

My overly wet mixture of almond paste and sugar.

Of course, I had to compromise. The recipe called for almond flour; from Seattle I brought almond paste in a can. This almond paste contains some sugar and water, so I was concerned the end product would be too moist. I mixed the almond paste and the sugar with my hands, and unlike their photo of a dry mixture, mine clung together in lumps. I added about a half cup of regular flour, until it felt a little better.

This is how my grandmother cooked - by sight and feel. I figured I'd go with that.

Egg whites get just as fluffy with a mechanical rotary mixer.

The recipe ingredients, save for the almond paste-almond flour disconnect, is nearly identical to the Joy of Baking Amaretti recipe. However, the techniques are different, and make all the difference to the cookie texture and stability.

The online recipe requires a modern kitchen appliance - either a mixer or a food processor, and has you adding the egg whites, in three batches, to the almond and sugar mixture. The result is a puree that flows out of the pastry bag in smooth mounds. These are lovely cookies hot out of the oven, but they turn chewy as they sit around, so don't travel well.

Pignoli in little mucchietti, awaiting a spoonful of dough.

The Italian recipe calls for whipping the egg whites, then incorporating them into the dry ingredients. You butter a cookie sheet, place about 10 pignoli in a mound every few inches, and drop a tablespoon or so of dough onto each mound. Then, you let them rest for at least two hours, I think to develop a crust.

That's the trick of classic Italian food. Fewer appliances, more patience.

Bake at 320 degrees (160 C.) about 10 minutes. Then slip them off the sheet with a knife. Mine turned out with a fine crunch on the outside and moist centers, and maintained the same texture the next day. They are sweeter than the store bought versions, due to the sugar in the almond paste. I'll fix that at home.

Notes: I will look for a wholesale price on almond flour and hope to lose my dependency on the high-priced canned almond paste. I'll probably use parchment paper on the next batch. I might try rolling the entire cookie in pine nuts or sliced almonds, and forming the cookies into different shapes. I think this recipe could be wildly adaptable for other delicate nut flours, such as hazelnuts and Brazil nuts.

Here are the ingredients with original and converted quantities:

150 g (1 cup) pinoli
150 g (1 1/4 cup) almond flour
250 g (1 cup) sugar
2 egg whites
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
20 g (1 1/2 T.) butter, to grease the cookie sheet