Castagnaccio

Well, I was offered some of the home-made chestnut flour from Tuscany, so I baked my own castagnaccio. I followed the recipe which my mother had used. She told me to use some more water than mentioned.
I love this dish, the flavour is delicious, and the smell is intoxicating when you're preparing it. It's very easy and quick to prepare. The only difficulty is obtaining the chestnut flour, which really determines the quality of the dish.


Serves 6

250 ml water
6 tbsp olive oil
100 g dried raisins, soaked in hot water
200 g chestnut flour
50 g pine nuts
50 g walnuts, peeled and chopped in big pieces
pinch of salt
pinch of rosemary

Put the chestnut flour in a big bowl, add salt and 2 tbsp olive oil.
Add water gradually while stirring with a fork, until you have obtained a smooth dough (as for a cake).
Drain the soaked raisins and add them to the dough.
Put some baking paper in a baking tin and grease it with 1-2 tbsp olive oil.
Spread the dough over the paper in a layer of max. 1 cm high.
Sprinkle pine nuts, walnuts and rosemary over this and 2 tbsp olive oil.
Bake for 30 min on 200°C, until cracks appear and the nuts are golden brown.
Pour off the excessive oil.

Although this dish doesn't contain any sugar, eggs and hardly any fat, it's pretty rich and you can serve it in small portions.
Go easy on the rosemary, so as not to spoil the dish with too strong a flavour.
Afterwards I found another recipe in Lorenza de Medici's 'ITALY The Beautiful Cookbook', which uses a lot more water, leaves out the walnuts and mixes most of the pine nuts through the dough. It also advocates eating the castagnaccio while it's still warm. Might try that next year, if I can get hold of another dose of that heavenly chestnut flour.