Recipe: Taralli

One of the best snacks any Italian can have around the house are taralli, a crispy bread stick. At the store you’ll usually find them in small circles flavoured with hot peppers, sun-dried tomatoes or fennel. My Calabrese side makes them much longer, in loops you need to snap in half, and using black anice seeds from Italy. This is a large recipe, if you are going to make taralli, you might as well make a lot, but if you decide to halve the recipe, use 2 eggs instead of 3. A word of warning: these are addictive.

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Heritage around the house…chestillu or crivu

Today’s picture is one of my favourite things in my house – my chestillu or crivu. I’ve mentioned this Calabrese tool before in my recipe for turdilli. “Chestillu” is decidedly the name of this from my dialect, but I’ve also found them online called a “crivu.” Another blogger’s recipe for turdilli mentions them here or you can find a short description on the Italian Wikipedia here. While I’ve only ever seen this used to make gnocchi and turdilli, apparently it was originally for sifting flour, and is also used for drying tomatoes or olives.

Recipe: Turdilli

Turdilli are a Christmas treat in our house. From my Calabrese side, they are indicative of the recipes from harder times – using what they had in the house for sweetness and flavour. In this case ,wine, coffee and honey for example. My grandparents would make these every Christmas, using a woven tool from their home town, a chestillu (I’m guessing here on spelling) to roll out the texture into the turdilli. It makes the same groves you would find on gnocchi and, in fact, that was the other thing we used a chestillu for. The end result is a sweet and savoury cookie (for lack of a better description) that is crispy fried on the outside, soft in the middle and coated in honey.

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