In this installment
Noccioliva Hazelnut & Chocolate Spread
Antonio Mattei Almond Biscotti Cookies
Noccioliva Hazelnut & Chocolate Spread
This is a love story that’s about more than hazelnuts.
Antonio delle Corte met Anna-Marie Conti in 2013. He was working in Rome and had came to be known as the “Mixologist of Gelato.” Some called him the Willy Wonka of ice cream.
She ran a Bed & Breakfast out of her family farm in the Sabine Hills outside of Rome, surrounded by groves and farms and natural beauty.
He stayed at the B&B, they fell in love, and they figured working together would be the easiest way to spend more time together, so they started Il Colle del Gusto (translation: the hills of taste) and have been growing ever since.
That’s the Cliff’s Notes version of the love story. Back to the gianduja.
That’s what this is: gianduja. That’s a northern Italian confection made from ground hazelnuts and chocolate and popularized the world over thanks to Nutella. But the real stuff is something special and that’s what we have here, except Antonio and Anna-Marie have given the recipe a bit of a twist. Instead of using dairy/butter to create their confection, they use olive oil from the neighboring farms as the texture contributor of the recipe. The result is an ultra-lux, ultra-smooth, rich, chocolatey spread that hums with the flavor of hazelnuts with a long, lingering finish.
For years I’ve been telling folks to spread this on toast or gelato/ice cream, or on top of cheese cake, or even with some light desserts like pane cotta or something. But the easiest, most delicious way I’ve found is just to dunk cookies or biscotti right into the jar and eat it that way. We enjoyed a wonderful, lounging three hour lunch with Antonio and Anna-Marie after we visited their production facility and we finished it all off by dipping crisp cookies into the jar and crunching away. I suggest you do the same. Oh look at that! You received biscotti in this installment as well. Huh. What a coincidence.
Antonio Mattei Almond Biscotti Cookies
These are the original biscotti, sweets that Tuscans have been eating for over one hundred and fifty years, long before every cafe in the continental US decided to offer overly dry, chocolate-dipped versions. Anything but a fad, these biscotti have been produced in Prato since 1858 by the Mattei family. (Antonio Mattei is mentioned in Pelligrino Artusi’s classic Italian cookbook, The Art of Eating Well, originally published in 1891.)
Made with Puglian almonds (almost 20% of the total weight), fresh eggs, pine nuts from Pisa (not the cheaper Chinese variety), you can taste the rich nuts over the flour and sugar that dominate the flavor of most biscotti. Both Corby Kummer and Carol Field—whose opinions on Italian food I hold in very high regard—say Mattei’s biscotti are the best. Try ’em for yourself.