Mostaccioli are traditional Italian cookies made with grape must during the fall.
Ingredients:
- Bread Dough
- Grape must or honey
- Anise seed (go easy)
- Pine nuts, walnut meats, or white grapes
Preparation:
Mostaccioli are small pastries that were once made in the Valdarno, Val di Chiana and Chianti areas during the grape harvest. "Modern recipes are likely much more elaborate," say the authors of the Italian recipe, "but we prefer to present the mostaccioli we remember, in other words the very simple sweets from many years ago, when almost all the farms, villas and hamlets had a beehive oven they'd fire up once a week to bake bread. As the name suggests, the primary ingredient of these cookies is grape must (mosto in Italian), the liquid pressed from the grapes that hasn't gone into the tanks, and thus has not been fermented into wine."Warm some must and work it into a hunk of dough left over from baking bread, adding just a bit of sugar and some anise seed to the dough as you knead. Pluck bits from the dough and flatten them out into rounds of the shape you most prefer, and dot them with pine nuts or walnut nutmeats, or even with wine grapes. Place the mostaccioli in the oven after the bread has baked, and expect them to puff up somewhat, since they are made from leavened dough. Some also use honey as a sweetener.
The recipe doesn't give proportions, which means you are free to experiment. Unless you have access to grape must, you'll have to use honey to sweeten the dough (check a good baking book for a Tuscan-style dough, most of which contain no salt). Though not as sweet as honey, grape must is much sweeter than grape juice, so you won't have to use too much. Assuming a pound of dough, I think I'd try between a quarter and a half cup of must (60-125 ml, or half that in honey) and then taste the dough to see if it's sweet enough (you don't want something as sweet as a cookie dough). Anise seed is also quite powerful, so go easy on it too -- a teaspoon or so in your first batch. With regards to baking, use the temperature suggested in the bread recipe and keep a close eye on the mostaccioli -- they should be done in 10-15 minutes.
