The Italian Table: Crucchi
I’m finally back on track with making my new recipe of the week within the week it’s meant to belong in! This week, I made Crucchi from Elizabeth Minchilli’s book, The Italian Table. I’m obsessed with Elizabeth - her Substack series, Instagram, and TikTok document her experience leading food tours around Italy with her daughter. It would be a dream come true to go on one someday. Some of my favorite content that she makes is when she’s just documenting a day of her life in Rome, taking us along with her one cup of coffee at a time.
The Italian Table is a gorgeous handbook for hosting a variety of food centered gatherings and celebrations. For each occasion, there are multiple recipes, beverage pairings, timing guides, and setting inspirations to accompany it. Though you can follow each chapter to a T and put together a glorious spread, there are so many friendly recipes that you can just pick and choose from to make on their own. Which is exactly what I did this week.
Inspired by the many hours of this season’s Great British Baking Show that I’ve been watching lately, I was in the mood to bake something completely new to me. Thumbing through The Italian Table, I came across Crucchi, which is a unique (to me at least) variety of biscotti. It’s not the long uniform biscotti that I’m used to. Instead, Crucchi is an irregular mound of hard chocolate and hazelnut cookie.
The recipe itself is extremely simple, and would’ve taken me a total of 10 minutes to put together if it hadn’t called for toasted blanched hazelnuts. I had raw hazelnuts, so I spent a considerable amount of time processing the hazelnuts to get them into the right state.
I looked up a few different methods for blanching hazelnuts, and essentially they’re all the same: Bring at least two cups of water to a boil, slowly pour in about three tablespoons of baking soda (which will foam up if you do it too quickly), and then drop in your hazelnuts. I wasn’t prepared for the amount of foam that came up when I put the hazelnuts in, so if you ever need to blanch hazelnuts, use a much bigger pot to water ratio. After about three minutes of boiling the hazelnuts, drop them into ice water for a few minutes, and then pull them out to remove the skin from each hazelnut (important because the skin is bitter).
After I blanched the hazelnuts, I had to toast them, which took about another 15-20 minutes. I just dropped them into a pan over medium heat and shook em around for a while until I could tell that they’d dried out a bunch and were looking toasty.
After preparing the hazelnuts, I was finally ready to make the actual recipe!
Other than the hazelnuts, the other big flavor was cocoa powder. Though there was a good amount of sugar, these aren’t the sweetest cookies ever.
So simple (other than the hazelnuts) and so good! It might be 11:34 pm right now, but I can’t wait to dip one of these Crucchi into some coffee tomorrow morning.
