In short. Cartellate are the Christmas pastry of Puglia: ribbons of wine-and-oil dough wound into rosettes, left to rest for hours, fried, then drowned in fig syrup and dusted with cinnamon. They take patience — most of it waiting.
In Apulian households cartellate are made in quantity, days before Christmas, and the making is a family job: one person cuts the strips, another pinches them closed, a third does the frying.
Ingredients
- 1 kg of white flour
- 200 g of extra virgin olive oil
- 200 g of dry white wine
- 10 g of salt, and tepid water
- Italian fig syrup (vincotto), to finish
- ground cinnamon and icing sugar
Method
1. The dough. Heap the flour on the work surface and make a well in the middle. Pour in the tepid wine and the oil. Dissolve the salt in about 50 cl of tepid water and use it to bring the dough together — you want it neither too firm nor too soft.
2. Rolling and cutting. Take pieces of dough and roll them out thin. Cut strips 3–4 cm wide with a pastry wheel.
3. Shaping. Fold each strip in half lengthways to make a little valley, and pinch it closed with your fingers every 3 cm. Then wind the strip around itself into a spiral, like a rosette.
4. Resting. Leave them to drain and rest for about six hours. This is not optional: it is what stops them unwinding in the pan.
5. Frying and finishing. Fry the cartellate in plenty of hot oil. Plunge them into the fig syrup, then dust with cinnamon mixed with icing sugar.
Vincotto, not wine. Despite the name, vincotto here is the dark, thick syrup made by slowly reducing figs (or grape must). It is what gives cartellate their colour and their depth — honey is the usual substitute, but it is a different sweet.
A note on the finish. The final dusting can also be done with coloured aniseed sprinkles — which is how you will most often see them on a Christmas table in Puglia.
The other Apulian sweets are on the desserts page.
