Hi! I am Amy Riolo, I am a cookbook author, cooking instructor, and culinary and restaurant consultant. And we’re going to be making Italian cookies.
The first cookie that we’re going to be making right now is pistachio, dried cherry and white chocolate biscotti. The ingredients which we’ll need are three cups unbleached all purpose flour, two teaspoons of baking powder, one half teaspoon of salt, one cup of sugar. You’ll also be needing six large eggs, two tablespoons vegetable oil, two teaspoons almond extract, one teaspoon vanilla extract and it can be dry or liquid, three quarters of a cup of raw unsalted Pistachios which have been shelled, one cup of dried cherries, and one half cup white chocolate chips or chocolate pieces.
The first thing that we need to do is combine our dry ingredients and I’m going to be using a standing mixer today but if you don’t have one at home it’s no problem. You can do this very easily with a regular bowl and a wooden spoon. That’s the way that the cookies were originally made.
So I have the three cups of all purpose unbleached flour which I will add in first and then we need our baking power, a little bit of salt, and our sugar. And once we’ve got all of those into the bowl, we can just connect it here to the standing mixer, lock it down into place then we can use our lever to bring it up and just mix the ingredients together on low speed.
Now while those are mixing, we can mix our wet ingredients. This is just to get the ingredients incorporated. The first thing that I have here are the six large eggs. To that, I’m going to add the vegetable oil. This is a very basic recipe and then I am going to add our almond extract and that really works well with the cherries. The combination of cherries and almonds is absolutely delicious. And a little bit of vanilla extract. This is dried powdered vanilla, you can also use the wet vanilla whichever you have. It’s just the flavor that we’re looking for but it’s nice to get really good pure extracts instead of imitation if you can find those. It’s much, much better and you come across with a cleaner tasting, more delicious cookie.
So now that we have the wet ingredients together, we can just mix those in with the dry. So continue mixing this on low speed for one minute. So now that our mixture is completely mixed together, we’re going to add in our important ingredients like the pistachios which are unsalted and shelled. And then we’re going to add in our dried cherries. You know that it takes about six to eight pounds of fresh cherries to make one cup of dried cherries. So they have a really concentrated sweet flavor and they give a lot of really good flavor to our cookies. But if you don’t have dried cherries it’s not a problem. You can use dry cranberries, apricots, raisins, whatever you like in this recipe will be very delicious. And just we’re going to combine this very gently so that we don’t really break anything up. And what we’re going to do with the mixture now is we’re piling it into mounts and then we’re going to make two strips. And these cookies will get baked twice.
The first bake is just going to cook them through and make them nice and soft. And some people that I know actually really like to eat them that way. When I teach my class some of the students say, “Well, they’re so good like this. Cant we just eat them?” So of course if you like them that way, they’re delicious and no one will ever no the difference that they were supposed to be something different. But if you like them crunchy and you are planning on dunking them in espresso or cafe latte, or something like that, then of course you can make them in the traditional way.
Now what I am doing here is I’m just kind of flattening out the dough with my hands and working it in because you want to evenly size rows, and you want about this much maybe two to three inches in the middle just so that they don’t come together as they bake, and that will be enough. And if you wet your fingers, this is even a little bit easier to do with the dough is so sticky that I think it works fine, just to do it this way.
So now what you can do is wash your hands and then we’re going to put these into an oven that’s been preheated at 375 degrees. We’re going to bake them for approximately 30 minutes until they’re golden brown. And you want to bake them in one of the higher racks. Not the highest but may be the second to the highest, definitely not the lowest rack.
So now we’ve taken our biscotti out of the oven. Let them cool for 30 minutes and I’ve also reduced the oven temperature to 325 because when we put them in for that second bake that’s at a lower temperature. I just remove it on from the pan on the silpat. I’m going to transfer them on to a cutting surface and then what we can do is with a sharp serrated knife, just make cuts straight down in them this way. And so you can see this is—it looks just like the biscotti that you buy in the store except hopefully all taste better. And this is a very soft version. So you can eat this just like this if you are giving them, for example, to young children or people who don’t want something so crunchy, you don’t want to dunk them. You’re going to take them maybe with you where you are not going to have a beverage to dunk them with. You can do it just like this.
And now if you are at home, you can continue doing that with the second row and putting them onto a second baking sheet. We’re going bake these just like this. We’re going to bake this at 325 degrees for about 20 to 30 minutes or until the biscotti are nice and hard to the touch and are dark golden brown.
So these are our crunchy and delicious dried cherry Pistachio in white chocolate biscotti and when we come back, we will be making our sesame cookies.
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