It's impossible to stop eating these adorable Sicilian cookies, called taralli. That's why it's important to learn to make them yourself, and you can get the recipe here.
The source is Fabrizia Lanza (above) of the famed Anna Tasca Lanza Cooking School at Case Vecchie in Sicily.
If you want to immerse yourself in genuine farm-to-table Italian food on a magnificent estate, this is the place. You'll use ingredients raised there and also taste the wines of the Tasca d'Almerita winery, founded on the property by Lanza's maternal grandfather, Giuseppe Tasca.
The taralli recipe is in her cookbook, "Coming Home to Sicily," subtitled "Seasonal Harvest and Cooking from Case Vecchie." More than a pleasing treat, these lemony knotted cookies represent the homestyle, artisanal, generations-old ways of cooking in Sicily that Lanza imparts in her school.
"These are very traditional biscuits that a household might make every month," she said, as she showed the procedure during an appearance at Melissa's Produce.
The dough requires an ingredient that many home bakers may not have heard of, food grade ammonium carbonate, which is also known as baker's ammonia and hartshorn salt. This powder attracts water particles, dries dough and makes crunchiness, Lanza explained.
Ammonium carbonate may not be familiar in the United States, but it's widely used elsewhere. My Danish aunt used it in cookies. And I bought it in India after attending a baking class in Chennai.
However, you don't have to go that far to get it, because it's available through Amazon. And you can use baking soda instead, Lanza said, although it doesn't produce the same effect. Still, the cookies at Melissa's (above) were irresistible.
The recipe also requires lard. "This was the fat used in cooking in the old days," Lanza said. Here, she's forming the dough into ropes that she will cut and twist into the cookies.
"Coming Home to Sicily," written with Kate Winslow, is full of delightful recipes such as this. Lanza "came home" to Sicily after years in northern Italy as an art historian and museum curator. The reason was to help her mother, Anna Tasca Lanza (above) with the cooking school that she had founded in 1989. Lanza now operates the school herself.
An idealist who wants local farmers, cheese-makers and others to feel the importance of their work, she emphasizes that Case Vecchie (above) is not just about recipes. It's about "examining something that is real and we want to keep alive," she said. Toward that goal, she founded the Food Heritage Foundation this year.
And she is producing food-related documentaries. The first was "Amuri" (love). The next will be "Amaro" (bitter). "The documentaries are a manifesto of the complexity I see behind food," she said.
Aristocratic and accomplished, Lanza is modest about her achievements. Her mother "was just a home cook like I am, by the way," she said. But this is the kind of food she promotes, natural, homestyle and made with an appreciation of what went into producing the ingredients.
TARALLI
From "Coming Home to Sicily" by Fabrizia Lanza
4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup lard
2 tablespoons powdered ammonium bicarbonate, also called hartshorn
Finely grated zest of 1 lemon
Pinch of fine sea salt
2 eggs
2/3 cup whole milk, lukewarm
2 cups powdered sugar
Juice of 1 to 2 lemons
Mix the flour and granulated sugar together on a work surface. With your hands, work in the lard, ammonium bicarbonate, lemon zest and salt. Make a well in the center and start working in the eggs and then the milk, bit by bit, with your hands, just until the mixture comes together into a very soft dough (you may not need to use all the milk). Knead the dough vigorously; it is done when the dough pulls off your fingers easily but is still sticky.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
On a lightly floured surface, roll a piece of dough into a 1/2-inch-thick rope; cut crosswise into 5-inch lengths. Shape each length of dough into a looped knot and place on the baking sheet. Repeat with the remaining dough. Bake until golden brown, about 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, in a small bowl, mix the powdered sugar and enough lemon juice to achieve a glaze consistency.
Dip the top of each cookie in the icing and transfer to a rack to cool.
Makes about 4 dozen.
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