Chestnuts Flour and Walnut Bread / Pane alla farina di castagne e noci

How I love the cold season. Vendors at every turn of a corner, the thick smoke coming from the roasting racks. Paper cones filled with roasted chestnuts keep my hands warm. Autumn and winter are my favourite season for their distinctive perfumes and flavours. Chestnuts come in the first place of my cold season food top ten. Sweet and fragrant, once amongst the staple food of our ancestors here in Ticino it has now become quite an expensive ingredient to buy in stores. Definitely not an every day ingredient if not for those who have the chance of being able to go in the woods and pick some. Every now and then I treat myself with a bag of chestnut flour and bake kolache. Lately I have been experimenting a bit and came up for this recipe for a bread I took to a dinner with friends. It’s flavour is intense and lends itself well to accompany a vegetable soup which is so seasonal. Chestnuts, walnuts and polenta are all products which are typical of my region and blend perfectly. This bread is one with a strong personality, it is rich and dense and keeps fresh for several days…a bit like bread did in the old days.

Maroggia’s Mill Cookbook: Rustic Polenta and Mushroom Gnocchi / Il Ricettario del Mulino di Maroggia: Gnocchi rustici alla polenta e funghi porcini

Here we come with a new appointment with Maroggia’s Mill Cookbook and polenta flour. Today I propose you a recipe for gnocchi which can also be used to recycle leftover polenta. Since I had to make polenta from scratch I decided to flavour it with dried mushrooms, and the result was excellent! An autumnal tasty recipe that I have no doubt your guests will fall in love with.

Maroggia’s Mill Cookbook: Polenta dorata, Lemon, Thyme and Polenta biscuits / Il Ricettario del Mulino di Maroggia: Biscotti al limone, timo e polenta dorata

We’re back with Maroggia’s Mill Cookbook and I present you with my the second recipe with polenta flour.

This time around with a sweet recipe for cookies which are perfect to be dunked in tea. I took inspiration from my recipe for sablés and adapted it to the use of corn meal, combined with dried thyme and lemon zest. This blend make these cookies particularly fresh and tasty, but already I am thinking how gorgeous they would be with the addition of dark chocolate chips and toffee cubes. A basic dough with which you can play and have fun inventing new flavours! Polenta flour and raw cane sugar add a nice rough texture to these cookies, which were very much appreciated by my guinea pigs.

Maroggia’s Mill Cookbook: Merlot flavoured Ticinese Taralli with polenta breading / Il ricettario del Mulino di Maroggia: Taralli Ticinesi al Merlot con panatura di polenta

I already mentioned Maroggia’s Mill and the high quality of its Farina Nostrana flour in my post for my Autumn Flower’s recipe, a sweet brioche with pumpkin and chestnuts cream, and I expressed the good intention of making an extra effort in the selection of flours that I use for my experiments in the kitchen. Said and done.