Baldino dessert

Did you know that the area of Arezzo is famous for chestnut trees?

Chestnut flour, is the main ingredient of a typical cake called Baldino! 😍 The flour is cooked together with the water in a copper pan and, before baking the dough, you can add nuts and raisins. How to recognize the authentic baldino? 🧐 The top is irresistibly crispy, while the bottom is soft! Baldino is a typical dessert of Casentino, it is a simple traditional cake made with chestnut flour and generally enriched with raisins and pine nuts, but also with walnuts, orange peel and/or rosemary. Tasting of baldino and sweet polenta with sausages and ricotta, pancakes and desserts with chestnut flour. There will also be an exhibition of local products: honey, cheese, chestnut jam, flour, apples, walnuts, and the reconstruction of a characteristic and traditional corner with a demonstration of old culinary practices.

Ingredients

300 gr. of chestnut flour

half a liter of water

1 handful of pine nuts

1 handful of shelled walnuts

1 sprig of rosemary (ramerino)

extra virgin olive oil

1 pinch of sea salt

How to do it

Take the chestnut flour and dissolve it in cold water, taking care that no lumps form, add two tablespoons of oil, a lock of "ramerino", a pinch of salt, a few pine nuts and walnut kernels. It is important that the flour is very liquid and that when placed in the pan it forms a thickness of no more than half a centimeter. Cook the baldino for a long time over medium heat. It is cooked when the surface is completely cracked.

Detailed preparation

In a large cup of hot water, soak the raisins. Put the 300 gr of flour in a tureen, sifting them beforehand. Add the pinch of salt and slowly, stirring with a whisk, the cold water so that a fairly liquid mixture is created without lumps and let it rest for half an hour. Sauté 3 tablespoons of olive oil for 1 minute together with the sprig of ramerino in order to obtain a lightly flavored oil that you will pour on the bottom of a rather low pan with the ramerino itself. At this point, add all the ingredients, taking care to sprinkle them on the bottom of the pan. After the resting time, pour the chestnut flour mixture into the pan, add another 3 tablespoons of oil trying to sprinkle the cake and bake for 30 or 40 minutes in the oven at 220°C.

Note

 Ramerino is a Florentine Easter tradition, large chewy rolls flavored with rosemary and raisins. In the past and still today, they were made for Giovedi’ Santo, (the day before Good Friday), marked with the Cross, and sold by street vendors outside the churches (often blessed by the priest) and in bakeries throughout Tuscany. It is the perfect combination of sweet and savory. Florentine rosemary bread was born in the Middle Ages. It is a devotional product and each of its flavors is tied to a symbolic significance. It is an emblem of the immortality of the soul and during the Middle Ages it was thought that rosemary kept away evil spirits. Rosemary, a plant which abundantly grows in Tuscany, results in the designation ramerino (Tuscan dialect for rosmarino). It is also known as panino con lo zibibbo, which refers to the type of grape used in the ancient recipe. A local grape, zibibbo, with seeds was used in the past and now it is more common to use seedless grapes. A more modern version has a shiny, sticky sweet sugar syrup top.