Our Kitchen

Passport & Plate - Nonna's Crostoli

Australia | Friday, March 14, 2014 | 5 photos

Ingredients
150 grams of melted butter unsalted
4 eggs
Pinch of salt
Dash of vanilla essence
Rind of a whole lemon
1 cup of white wine
3 tablespoons, give and take, of good quality whisky for aroma
¼ tablespoon of grappa
2 tablespoon vinegar white
6 tablespoons of caster sugar
Vegetable oil – quantities may vary, so just have a bottle on hand
4 cups of plain flour and 2 cups of self-raising flour, sifted together
And, according to my Nonna – “…a lot of love. A lot of patience. And two sets of hands.”

 

How to prepare this recipe
Combine all wet ingredients in a large bowl and mix well. Add the flours and caster sugar to the liquid mixture, mix and knead to a dough. The dough should be soft, but firm to touch. Place the dough into a bowl, cover with a tea towel and let it rest for 15 minutes. While the dough is resting, begin preparing the pasta machine.
With a butter knife, cut the dough into small pieces – approximately the size of two walnuts. Flatten these and gently feed each through pasta machine on the first (1st) or largest setting, ensuring you are using two hands to guide the pastry through. Repeat this 3 or 4 times with each piece of pastry, each time adding flour to each side to prevent the pastry from sticking to the machine.
Adjust the pasta machine to the fourth (4th) setting. Feed each piece of pastry through the machine twice. You should now have long, lasagne-like sheets of pastry. Lay these flat on a damp tablecloth and cover with another damp table cloth to prevent the pastry from drying out.
Adjust the pasta machine to the sixth (6th) setting, and cut the sections into smaller pieces. Roll each piece through the pasta machine, just once, and lay flat on the table cloth. Here, you can be a little creative – cut the flat sheets into smaller rectangles (you could try squares and triangles or really, any shape your heart desires) and cut a small slit in the centre to prevent the pastry from expanding like a balloon.
In a large shallow pan, heat the oil. Test the temperature by placing the end of the wooden spoon in the oil - when bubbles form and appear at the spoon, the oil is ready to use. Fry each piece, turning once, until each side is a very light golden colour and the pastry crisps and bubbles slightly. Using tongs, drain excess oil by placing the crostoli on sheets of paper towel.
After the crostoli are completely cool, dust with icing sugar and serve. These also keep for about a week in an airtight container.

 

The story behind this recipe
There is nothing particularly exciting about eggs, oil, flour and sugar, unless of course, someone like my Nonna is behind it. Though being a simple pastry, crostoli can be made according to dozens of different recipes, but there is no other type I prefer over my Nonna’s– or specifically, her Zia Lisa’s. Nonna’s is always a richer golden hue from her chickens' freshly laid egg yolks and has a gorgeous level of crispness that snaps at a touch and dissolves against your tongue.
My Nonna’s typical answer when asked which ingredients were thrown together to land on my licked-clean plate as the scrumptious morsels still linger in my mouth is “…oh, you know - a little bit of this; a little bit of that”. Her cooking is an art – it cannot be explained as a simple list of ingredients, but rather the product of years of trialing, testing and trialing some more. I have been incredibly fortunate to spend hours with my Nonna and attempted to document her culinary secrets and then create it for my own friends, albeit never quite as well.
For me, crostoli is synonymous with family occasions – for as long as I remember, there has been a plate of fresh crostoli at every family celebratory get-together. It is brought out after the birthday candles had melted and long been blown out, when stomachs are otherwise full, and then even casually, with a cup of milky tea after dinner. Crostoli is early Sunday mornings of kneading dough with the Italian radio on in the background, it is having the entire extended family in one house, it is licking the icing sugar off your fingertips, and stealthily smearing excess oil on the hems of tablecloths. It is the “ciao darling!” at the doorstep, the consolation at the end of an awful day or the celebration of a good one. It perfectly offsets the tartness of a cup of inky dark espresso, but can easily be paired with freshly squeezed orange juice.
For me, crostoli is a little bit of this and a little bit of that - and quite a lot in between.