Italian Food Recipes

Castagnaccio is a traditional Italian dessert particularly in Tuscany where it is also called baldino or pattona, it is a strange Italian dish but it is simple and fast to prepare. The main ingredients that you need to prepare it are: flour of chestnuts, water, pine kernels, sugar and extra virgin olive oil. In some case you can find also recipes enrich with walnuts, raisins and rosemary. Castagnaccio traditionally should be cooked in a baking pan of copper tinned and might be prepared with sweet flour of chestnuts that is produced as from November, if you want you can also change the water with milk in order to obtain a sweeter tart. According to the tradition the use of rosemary is linked to a love legend: the rosemary use to flavour castagnaccio was a sort of love elixir so that who eats castagnaccio falls in love with the girl that offers him castagnaccio.

INGREDIENTS (for 8 people):
400 g of Flour of Chestnuts
50 g of Sugar
400 ml of Water
4 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
50 g of Pine kernel
20 g of Butter

PREPARATION TIME: 10 minutes

COOKING TIME: 30 minutes

WINE: Aleatico dell’Alba

PREPARATION
Place the flour of chestnuts and the sugar in a bowl add the extra virgin olive oil

and mix, then add the water little by little and in the same time stir the mixture in order to not make lumps.

Now add the pine kernel, butter and flour a baking pan of 22 cm of diameter, pour in it the mixture

and bake at 180°C for 30 minutes or until the surface present crack and the pine kernels become golden.
This is the result:

BUON APPETITO!