Carnival cakes: the fried Chestnuts
What are the chestnuts
The chestnuts are a typical sweet of the carnival shaped like small balls, from which they take the name for the form similar to chestnuts
Originary of Emilia Romagna and flavoured anise, nowadays they are prepared throughout Italy and prepared in many different varieties: filled with ricotta, pastry cream, chocolate, alchermes or oven.
What is the difference between chestnut and pancakes?
The chestnuts are a soft and fried sugary dough with a characteristic shape of balls that resemble chestnuts.
The pancakes can be both sweet and salty and have a roundish shape crushed, usually to prepare them just fry a batter of bread in oil or strut until they become golden
How do you make a perfect cooking of chestnuts?
Cooking chestnuts is not very simple but not impossible, if you happen that chestnuts burn and remain raw inside or are soaked with oil, the problem is only one temperature of oil.
It is necessary to wait for the oil to be warm at the right point, to be sure on the temperature you will just dip a toothpick or a small pond in the oil, if this starts to rub and there are so many bubbles the temperature is right.
If you have a kitchen thermometer, you will only have to keep the oil between 165° – 170°
But I recommend that you do not put too much chestnut to cook otherwise the temperature of the oil will go down and you will not have a good cooking.
Recipe of fried chestnuts
Now let’s see how to prepare delicious carnival chestnuts
Ingredients for 35 chestnuts:
– 200 g type 00 flour
-50 g potato starch
-2 medium-sized eggs
-60 g of sowing sugar
-30 g soft butter –
-2 tablespoons of rum or anise liqueur or whatever you prefer (25 ml)
-6 g chemical yeast for sweets –
-1 grated lemon peel
-1 grated orange peel
-a pinch of salt
– oil for frying
-Silk sugar to decorate
- Take all the ingredients (flavour, yeast, sugar, eggs, soft butter or oil, salt, lemon peel, liqueur) put them in a planetary and knead them until they get a homogeneous dough.
- Then let the dough rest for about 20 minutes.
- Spread the dough on a pavement and get some balls of about 10g each.
- At this point, bring the oil in temperature (between 165° and 170°) and start to cook the chestnuts at a time until they are golden, then drain and still hot pastels in the sugar semolate
Variant: baked chestnuts
If you do not love fry there is a variation of the baked chestnuts, much lighter seen that they are not fried but equally good.
The recipe is the same (above quoted) of the fried chestnuts will change only the method of cooking and sealing.
As for cooking, simply place the chestnuts in an oven pan and cook them in a preheated oven at 180° for 10 minutes, to check they are cooked, just put a stecchino in a chestnut, if the latter is dry, it means they are cooked.
Instead, as for the seal, still hot, you have to quickly pass them into orange juice or in a liquor wet to taste and then pass them into the sugar so that the sugar will be soaked.
