How did I pick the recipes for this project? First I searched online for the most popular (or representative?) Italian dishes. I started from there. One other thing was my personal preference. I wanted to try preparing many of these recipes for a long time (such as the “pizza napoletana”, the “tiramisu” or the “lasagna”). But in a couple of cases, I just went with a dish just because I liked the name. I liked how it sounded. The “sbrisolona” is one of these 😊.
For some weird reason, I thought that if I had the “sfogliatelle”, I should also do the “sbrisolona”. They kind of sound similar, right? Or, at least, they start with an “s” and a consonant. I like words like that in Italian. Always! But… if I only had known that for this recipe I would have to use cornmeal, maybe I would have chosen another one 😄. Cornmeal is one of those few ingredients that I don’t like that much. Especially on sweet recipes! But I tried to do the best anyway.
Recipe of the Week: Sbrisolona
The “sbrisolona” technically would be a cake. But it’s a special one. It’s quite thin, you don’t use any leavening, and very dry. It’s more like a nougat (turrón / torrone). It’s made of a mix of wheat flour, cornmeal, and almonds. That’s pretty much it. You only add some oil and sugar (and lemon zest). And there you have it: a “sbrisolona”.
This is probably the simplest recipe I did so far. It’s also the one I liked the least! This week I did “pizza napoletana” for the second time. And I see myself doing some of the other recipes in the future (like the “tiramisu”, the “lasagna”, the “gnocchi”, etc). But not the “sbrisolona”. I don’t think I’m ever going to do this again. The flavour was okayish. I liked the lemon and the almonds. But the cornmeal… I just don’t like it!
There weren’t many vegan versions of the “sbrisolona” on YouTube. A couple of them had fillings and additional stuff. But, as for what I learned, the traditional one was also the simplest. And that’s what I wanted to try.
New Vocabulary
I added 3 new cards to my Anki deck, based on new words and expressions used on the YouTube videos used for this recipe. There was not much text on the video, just some captions. I didn’t add the phrase for the cornmeal variety used typically in this recipe (“farina di Fioretto”). I know I won’t need it 😁.
That’s all for now! 😊
