Wild Yeast

Notes from my kitchen, in which I bake bread and raise a few other matters

Taralli Pugliese

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Meet my new favorite snack…

… my new favorite gift food…

… and my new favorite Christmas tree ornament…

… all rolled (literally) into one crunchy little Italian wheel called a tarallo.

These taralli, which are a cross between a bagel and a hard bread stick and which Ilva assigned as the Bread Baking Babes’ December project, are better than the taralli I have made before. I attribute this to the greatly-increased proportion of olive oil, which gives a tender, crumbly interior texture while keeping the outside firm and crunchy. Oh, and there’s a lot more fennel, too, so you’re pretty much guaranteed a superior result right there. And then there’s the wine…

You can see Ilva for the recipe; here are a few of my comments:

  • I made 3/4 of the batch (using 750 grams of flour), and this still seemed like a lot of dough.
  • The recipe says the fennel is optional. Not.
  • I opted for the wine instead of egg, replacing 1.5 eggs with 75 grams of wine.
  • I added about a cup (237 grams, give or take) of water in all.
  • To portion the dough uniformly, I rolled thumb-thickness ropes about 24 inches long and used a dough cutter to cut them into lengths about 2 inches long, then rolled each piece to baby-finger thickness. In case you aren’t used to thinking in units of body appendages, this is about 1 centimeter or 3/8 inch in diameter.
  • The dough is oily and I was worried that the joined ends weren’t going to stay together through the boiling and baking, but they did.
  • I loved the charming way they had of sinking to the bottom of the boiling pot, only to pop up to the top with élan a minute or two later. They reminded me of my daughter’s little dog, who has springs for legs.
  • I needed to bake my taralli for 40 – 45 minutes in order to get them brown.

You will want to make these! And when you do, send them to Ilva before December 29 to gain Bread Baking Buddy status.

CommentsLeave a comment

  1. they look so lovely and I am very happy you like them, being such a taralli lover myself! And thank you for posting your comments!

  2. Hello, I was wondering if you ever use the Italian flour caputo type 00 in any of baking, I will be making them let you know how it turns out, yours look yummy!

  5. THANK YOU FOR THIS POST!!! Yes, I’m yelling, because I’ve tracked down a slew of taralli recipes (in English) and all were uniformly bad or sweet as cookies. Nothing like the incredible, warm taralli I ate in Naples. My Italian’s not good enough to translate recipes, so I’m ecstatic to have a tested, English-language recipe to try out. My favorite taralli are flavored with black pepper and caramelized onions…

  9. Those rings are so cute!! And how brilliant are you to hang them on the tree?! What an excellent idea. (Hmm, I wonder if we’ll have enough left to do that.)

    We love the fennel as well but are having a LOT of difficulty deciding whether we prefer the plain to the fennel.

    And I really want to try Ilva’s peperoncino/chili oil idea too.

  11. Copy…print…run to the market to replenish wine & fennel seeds…BAKE!! These look right up my alley and I can’t wait to try them. This is perfect timing — thank you, Susan!

  18. Hello, if you want I give you the recipe for real the taralli. The ingredients are; flour, 500g 125 mililiter oil 400ml, white wine, salt and herbs will at as fennel seeds, chilli or rosemary. Mix all the ingredients and work the dough for about 20 mins. After that, he is going to call for the draft of the tarallini. Baking them at 190 degrees Celsius for 25 minutes.

Trackbacks

  2. […] Über Susan bin ich bei Lucullian delights auf ein Rezept für Taralli Pugliesi gestoßen. Taralli sind kleine, snack-artige Brotringe aus Apulien, die normalerweise mit Fenchelsaat zubereitet werden. Es gibt aber auch andere Varianten, z.B. mit Chili. Da Weihnachten heute Abend an die Tür klopft und ich noch ein paar kleine Aufmerksamkeiten zum Verschenken gesucht habe, kamen mir die Taralli gerade recht. So habe ich sie noch kurzfristig in meinen Backplan eingearbeitet. […]

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