Monday, December 08, 2003

Adventures in Anise Biscotti   Hrmph!  One thing is true – if you have doubts about a recipe, don’t make it!!  Somehow I tend to forget this and forge ahead anyhow against my own better judgement . . .   Let me first say that making biscotti is somewhat of a family tradition.  There is a strong Italianophile bent to my dad’s cooking background (he spent his junior year abroad in Rome and the love affair has never ended . . . and some my best food memories also come from teenaged summers spent in Italy).  We call ourselves, jokingly, la famiglia Oconnelli – especially when making homemade pasta and biscotti.   Anyhow, this year I decided to make some Anise biscotti instead of the usual almond ones.  The “famiglia” recipe is a very simple one (I think of it as making pasta, just with sugar and almonds, since it is basically just eggs and flour, with a bit of vanilla, sugar, and some baking powder).  You get a sticky, ropy dough and then knead in toasted almonds by hand.  Bake the ropes at low temperature for a while (35 mins?) then cut them and do the second baking for a long time at low temperature to dry them out.  They are very crunchy, crisp, and not at all crumbly; ideal to serve with sweet wines or coffee.  I have always felt that this is the ONLY way to make biscotti – simple, easy, and very crispy-crunchy.   For some reason, this year I decided to tinker.  What was I thinking?  I looked around on some online recipe sources and found this recipe, both on Epicurious and All-Recipes.  It got so many raves, I thought – why not?  Even though butter is NEVER part of our family recipe and I feel, somehow, that this is the right thing for biscotti – hey, who am I to judge?   Well, of course I was right (!).  First of all, I had some sambuca, no anise extract, and no brandy, so I decided to substitute the sambuca for the brandy, and reduced the sugar to 1 ½ cups, thinking the sambuca would be sweet.  Then I laboriously creamed all that butter and sugar together with my little hand mixer.  Easy?  No.  I think I should get over my fear of using the food processor for baking, since I have such a swanky new food processor.  Anyhow, I got the dough all assembled, sambuca and all, and stirred in toasted pistachios (sounded better than almonds with anise).  Then I tasted the dough . . . ack!  Sweet! . . . well, too late now.   After the first baking, I noticed that the logs were a bit crumbly as I cut them . . . uh-oh, this has never happened before . . . then I tasted one of the end pieces (it is mandatory to eat these while making biscotti!)  and ack!  Too sweet! And, CRUMBLY!  Well, what did I expect with all that butter?  Anyhow, I forged on and rebaked them, which did improve things a bit – at least they got more crunchy in addition to crumbly.  But they are definitely not biscotti-like, to my mind.  I find them too sweet, but that is not surprising given my almost total lack of sweet-tooth . . . what I object to is the toothsome crumb.  Biscotti, in my mind, should be crunchy and crisp, definitely not crumbly.  The American taste wants them to be more like our buttery, crumbly cookies, so we add butter.  But the truly Italian version has no butter and yields small, crunchy cookies that require coffee or wine for dunking . . .  <sigh> not that my “biscotti” are bad, really but they just don’t seem like biscotti to me, at least not like the biscotti I grew up with and learned to make for my dad (who used to hide them in his study closet in a tin so they “wouldn’t get eaten up too fast,” more like so he got to eat them all. . . .)   I think people who don’t have my same childhood biscotti hang-ups will like them in their Christmas cookie-boxes, so I’m not dumping the lot (besides, my inherited thriftiness can’t stand the thought of wasting a whole cup of butter, $1.50!! plus a cup of pistachios $3.00!!! I know; it’s like a sickness).  But I feel bad, somewhere in the back of my mind, to be giving something that doesn’t seem completely “right.”    That’ll larn me to mess with success . . . to question my instincts . . . and to not make test batches before I launch fully into Holiday Baking.  Of course, I’d have to give away the test batches, too, since my dearly beloved future husband has even less of a sweet tooth than I do.  I have to force and beg him to taste my baked goods for approval. (Sounds like Marsha from Hot Water Bath -- see her Dec 6th “Cookie Monster” entry – and I should trade places at this time of year. . . !)     Actually, the cookies do seem better this morning now that they’ve dried out a bit. . . maybe by the time I get the rest of the boxes together at the end of the week they’ll be deemed acceptable by even a biscotti snob like me.  (Here’s hoping).   And if you want it, here’s the “famiglia Oconnelli” recipe for almond biscotti:   Preheat oven to 325; put 1 cup raw whole almonds on a cookie sheet and toast them in the oven for about 10 minutes, occasionally shaking the tray and checking the nuts while you think about mixing the rest of the dough.  They are done when you start to smell them. . . take them out as soon as you do!!  Let them cool while you make the dough.    Dry ingredients:            2 cups flour                                     1 cup sugar                                     1 ½ tsp baking powder                                     ¼ tsp salt   Wet ingredients –          2 eggs                                     1 tablespoon vanilla or other extract (you could use                                     a combination  of vanilla and almond, or substitute                                     anise extract and then add a tablespoon of whole                                     anise seeds to the dry ingredients, and use pistachios                                     instead of almonds)   Use a whisk to mix the dry ingredients well in a large bowl.  Then whisk the eggs with the extract in a measuring cup or small bowl until the eggs are well broken.  Dump the wet into the dry and mix together until you get a sticky, messy dough.   Flour your hands and turn the dough out onto the counter.  Start rolling it into a long, thin rope; then toss the almonds out onto the counter and roll the dough rope over them, pressing the nuts into the dough until you feel like they are well distributed (you can double up the rope and keep rolling if it gets too long.)   Divide the rope into 2 or 3 lengths that can fit, with plenty of space between them, long-ways on a non-stick cookie sheet (use some parchment or foil if you don’t have non-stick).  (the thinner your ropes, the smaller the finished cookies will be).   Bake these in the 325 oven for 35-40 minutes, until they are slightly firm to the touch and just slightly brown.   Take them out, let them cool slightly, then slice them on the diagonal with a sharp knife.  Lay the slices (with their cut sides facing up and down) back on the cookie sheet.  You’ll probably need an additional one as they take up more room sideways!  Lower the oven to 300, and put the cookies in to lightly brown, which should take about 25 mins. Check and turn them mid-way through so they don’t get too brown on the bottoms.   Let them cool completely, then store them in a tin for up to months and months if they last that long.  They actually improve after at least a couple of days, so try to hide them if you have a resident cookie monster . . . .  And make them first if you are doing holiday cookie boxes!     10:12:04 AM    comment []