Squeeze it through!

So here's the continuation of my post on cookie baking from yesterday. As I mentioned the other cookies/biscuits I baked on the week end were Crumiri. These are typical biscuits of Piedmont (like Baci di Dama): actually a quite simple butter cookie dough pepped up by including some maize flour in the dough. They have a characteristic horseshoe shape and are piped through a star tipped pastry bag (that sounds much easier than it is!).

The Crumiri have a simple but very pleasant taste, the maize/corn giving a very nice "rustic" feel. Maize is one of those ingredients (tomatoes, beans, many fishes and so on) that worked its way in Italian cuisine from the bottom. First it was considered food for animals and poor people... nobles would not touch the stuff... spoiled brats! Then once the nobles and bourgeois noticed how much success the stuff had they tried it themselves. Today maize is present in quite a few Italian dishes: apart from the famous polenta there are many sweets and breads made with maize.
I tried making these cookies the first time a few weeks ago using Carol Field's recipe. They tasted great, especially since she uses only cornmeal (no corn flour) which gives a great crunch but did not keep the shape they got from being piped through the pastry bag. I searched on the net and found quite a few recipes (mostly in Italian) all pretty identical. From those I got the impression that Carol Field's dough is way too soft to keep those nice ridges Crumiri should have. Or maybe I just screwed up badly somewhere. From what I found on the net and my first experiment I got to the following recipe:

100 g (3.2 oz) corn flour
40 g (1.3 oz) fine cornmeal
110 g (3.5 oz) flour, all purpose
140 g (4.5 oz) butter
2 egg yolks
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
a pinch of salt

I first mixed all the dry ingredients well then rubbed in the cold butter cut into small pieces. Once i started getting "crumbs" of dough I added the yolks and mixed just long enough to get a compact dough, which went for 30 minutes in the fridge.
Now came the funny (very ironic) part. You're supposed to pipe the mass with a pastry bag into 10 cm (4 in.) long strips which are then shaped into horseshoes. As much as I tried the dough did not want to come anywhere near the pastry bag tip. I considered using brute force but the experience from two burst pastry bags advised against it. So I armed myself with patience and squeezed the cookies through the pastry bag tip using my fingers. It took a LOT of time. I know that some food processors/pasta machines have special attachments for making such cookies. There are even meat grinders with this sort of attachment just for the purpose here in Germany (because of the industrial scale of cookie baking in some families). Next time I'll probably try and get one of those! If you have some melted chocolate at hand you could dip the tips of the cookies in it, not traditional but..yum! I couldn't since I had used all for the Baci di Dama.
Was it worth it? Yep, after all. I'm actually considering doing a double batch soon... with chocolate!

Comments

[kate]

You can get something called a cookie press, consisting of a metal (or plastic, probably) tube with interchangeable metal plates for the different designs. You turn a wheel to push the dough out. Look up recipes for Spritz; that's what you want....
It still takes a little practice, but you get the hang of it.
(If they're hard to find where you are, try a Scandinavian shop.)

[Alberto]

Thanks for the tip, cookie press is an option I did not know of. I don't know how easy it is to find in Gemany as here, as I mentioned, a different press exists, that looks a bit like a meat grinder and is quite expensive. BTW cookies made with thiss press are called Spritzkekse, Spritz cookies! The world is a small place sometimes.