I keep being amazed at the different things you can find in Europe that you could never think of finding so easily in a tropical country. Yes I know people love tropical weather and tropical fruit, but when you grow up seeing tropical everything, it loses a bit its charm. Maybe that is why I still find fascinating all the ingredients I find here that are not typical from my country.
For example, nuts. Hazelnuts and walnuts in my country are sold in supermarkets imported from the USA, and most commonly found as an ingredient in candy bars and sweets. We buy them a lot around the Christmas season. Apart from that, I never gave so much thought about these nuts the rest of the year.
Now here in Italy, my in-laws gave us a lot of walnuts and hazelnuts (a bag full of them) from a box they have at home full of nuts they pick up every other day when they go out to exercise. Like, they go in this trail just a couple of kilometers from the town, to do jogging and walking, and this trail is surrounded by fields and nature, including walnut and hazelnut trees. You just pick them up and that's it. Free nuts.
It does take a little patience to open a bunch of these nuts to cook, but the reward is quite worth it. They do candied nuts all the time, or toast them and use them as toppings in salads. I have made "salsa alle noci" which is walnut cream sauce for pasta, and also made mexican mole. My last experiment was making hazelnut chocolate cookies, inspired in the traditional amaretti italian cookies made with almonds. For this cookies I used:
1 egg white
85 gr of hazelnuts
75 gr of sugar
2 heaping tsps of cocoa powder
dash of kahlua coffee liquor
The inspiration for this recipe was: not having flour at home, and because I want to do amaretti in the weekend so I wanted to practice.
First I whisk the egg white until it was doubled in volume and started to form very soft peaks. I took the hazelnuts and sugar together, put them in the food processor, and processed this until it resembled coarse sand. I think I could have processed longer but I have little patience when I am hungry. Then I mixed the egg white with the hazelnut chocolate mixture, mixed in the cocoa powder and kahlua, and the batter was done. I should have put a pinch of salt to balance the sweetness, will remember next time.
Then I took small portions of the batter and made little balls, around 8 or 9. Use your hands for this. Put the little balls on a baking tray covered in parchment paper and bake for only 10 minutes at 160°C. Turn the oven off and leave them in for 2 more minutes just to dry them up a bit more. Then take them out and cool on a wire rack.
These cookies are super fast and super simple to do, In case you have issues with gluten, they are gluten free. And no fat added. They are light, crisp outside, moist and chewy inside, crunchy and chocolatey. Absolutely delicious.
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