Puglian Christmas Rose Pastries | Cartellate Pugliesi

Sep 29

11 min read

Cartellate Pugliesi (Puglian Christmas Rose Pastries)

Cartellate are the pastry that tells a Puglian family Christmas has started. A strip of thin dough is fluted along one edge, coiled into a rose, pinched shut at intervals, dried overnight and fried pale gold, then dipped in warm vincotto until every fold carries the dark cooked must. They are crisp, barely sweet in themselves, and built to sit in a tin for weeks while visitors keep arriving. Everything about them is cheap, and everything about them is exacting.

Yield: about 30 cartellate, 8 servings. Prep: 1 hour. Drying: 12 hours. Cook: 30 minutes. Total: about 14 hours including the rest. Difficulty: intermediate. Course: dessert. Region: Puglia, from Bari to the Salento.

The Story

Cartellate belong to the whole of Puglia and are claimed most loudly by Bari, where the dialect calls them carteddate and where making them is an Advent job rather than a Christmas Eve one. The name is traced to the idea of something wrapped or bound up, and the shape carries the same reading: depending on which grandmother is talking, the coil is the halo over the manger, the bands that swaddled the infant, or the crown of thorns waiting at the other end of the story. The pastry itself is medieval in feel and convent in method, flour and oil and wine and almost nothing else, the kind of sweet a region with no butter and very little sugar could still make beautiful once a year.

What makes them Puglian is not the dough but what goes on it. Vincotto is grape must or fig juice cooked down for hours until it darkens into something between a syrup and a balsamic, sweet but with a sour edge and a faint smokiness from the long reduction. Fig vincotto is the older and more southern choice and leaves a deeper, jammier coat. Grape vincotto, usually pressed from Negroamaro or Primitivo, stays sharper and glossier on the pastry. Honey belongs to the same tradition and takes over wherever bees were easier to keep than a vineyard was to press, which is why the honey version dominates in the hills inland and across the border into Basilicata.

The other truth about cartellate is that they were never made by one person. Shaping is slow and the dough waits for nobody, so kitchens filled up: one woman rolling, two cutting and pinching, children carrying trays to a cool room to dry. Batches ran to several hundred pieces, because the same tin had to feed a household through the whole stretch of visits, from San Nicola on the sixth of December in Bari to the days after Epiphany. Many households still shape them with the same brass wheel handed down a generation, and the roses go onto a cloth rather than paper because cloth draws moisture from both sides. That is also why the recipe carries no butter and no eggs. It is built to keep, and a well dried, properly fried cartellata stays crisp for a fortnight in a closed tin, which no enriched dough will do.

Ingredients

Two choices matter more than the rest. Use a soft wheat flour with a little fine durum semolina in it, which gives the brittleness these folds need, and find real vincotto rather than a balsamic reduction sold as one. The wine should be dry, cheap and something you would drink.

For the dough

All purpose flour, 4 cups (500 g)
Semola rimacinata, fine durum semolina, 1/2 cup (85 g)
Extra virgin olive oil, 1/3 cup (80 ml)
Dry white wine, warm, 2/3 cup (160 ml)
Granulated sugar, 1 tbsp (12 g)
Fine sea salt, 1/2 tsp (3 g)
Finely grated orange zest, from 1 orange
Finely grated lemon zest, from 1 lemon
Ground cinnamon, 1/4 tsp (0.5 g)
Strip of orange peel for scenting the oil, 1

For frying

Mild olive oil or peanut oil, 6 cups (1.4 L)

For finishing

Fig vincotto, 1 1/2 cups (360 ml)
Wildflower honey, 1/2 cup (120 ml), as the alternative coat
Toasted almonds, finely chopped, 1/3 cup (45 g)
Diavolilli, coloured sugar sprinkles, 2 tbsp (25 g)
Ground cinnamon, for dusting
Confectioners sugar, for dusting
Finely grated orange zest, from 1/2 orange

Preparation

Step 1

Scent the oil and warm the wine. Put the olive oil in a small pan with the strip of orange peel and bring it to just warm, around 140°F (60°C), then take it off the heat and leave it to stand for 15 minutes before lifting the peel out. Warm the white wine to the same temperature in a second pan. Warm liquids let a very dry dough come together with far less of them than a cold mix needs, and the oil carries the citrus through the whole dough instead of leaving it on the surface. Mix the flour, semolina, sugar, salt, cinnamon and both grated zests in a wide bowl.

Step 2

Knead a firm dough and rest it. Pour the warm oil into the dry mix and rub it through with your fingers until the flour looks sandy, then add the warm wine in three additions, working with a fork between each. Bring it together by hand and knead on a bare bench for a full 10 minutes. The dough should finish firm, silky and completely uniform, tighter than pasta dough and with no tack left in it. Wrap it and leave it at cool room temperature for 1 hour. That hour lets you roll it thin without it snapping back, and a rushed dough fights the pin and tears at the fluted edge.

Step 3

Roll, flute and coil the roses. Work with a quarter of the dough at a time and keep the rest wrapped. Roll it to about 1/16 inch (1.5 mm), thin enough to read print through, then cut strips 1 1/4 inches (3 cm) wide and 14 inches (35 cm) long with a fluted wheel so one long edge is scalloped. Fold each strip along its length, scalloped edge standing up, and pinch it closed every 1 1/4 inches (3 cm), pressing hard enough to feel the two layers become one. Coil the strip into a rose, seating each pinched pocket against the one before, and set it on a tray lined with a cloth.

Step 4

Dry the roses, then fry them. Leave the trays uncovered in a cool, airy room for 12 hours, turning the roses once halfway through. They must finish rigid and sound faintly hollow when tapped. Bring the frying oil to 330°F (165°C) and keep a thermometer in it. Lower in three or four roses at a time and fry 2 to 3 minutes, turning once, until they are the colour of pale straw and no darker. This is the one fried sweet where blond is correct: taken to deep gold, folds this thin turn bitter. Lift them onto a rack and cool them completely, which takes about 20 minutes.

Step 5

Coat them in vincotto. Warm the vincotto in a small pan to about 120°F (50°C) and no hotter, so it stays fluid without thickening. Hold each cooled cartellata with tongs, lower it in for 4 or 5 seconds only, turn it once and lift it out, letting the excess run back into the pan. Set the coated roses on a rack over a tray to drain for at least 30 minutes. A cold pastry into warm syrup takes a thin coat and stays crisp underneath. A warm pastry drinks the syrup and goes soft within the hour. Scatter the almonds, sprinkles and zest while the coat is still tacky.

Plating

Cartellate are a tray sweet rather than a plated dessert, and they are best served the way they are made: piled on a wide flat plate or in a shallow basket, four or five per person, with the darkest and glossiest on top. Serve them at cool room temperature. Straight from the refrigerator the vincotto goes stiff and dull, and warm from the fryer they have not yet set. Dust the pile with confectioners sugar and a breath of cinnamon at the table rather than in the kitchen, since the sugar dissolves into the syrup within minutes. For a restaurant version, stand three roses upright against each other on a small plate, spoon a little warm vincotto in front of them, add toasted almonds and a strip of candied orange, and leave the rest of the plate bare.

Professional Technique

Every cartellata is held together by nothing but pressure. There is no egg wash, no water seal, no crimping tool: the pinches along the folded strip are the only thing stopping the rose from unwinding, and in the oil steam builds inside those closed pockets within seconds of the pastry going in. Treat each pinch as a weld and the whole method starts to explain itself.

A weld needs contact and it needs the right kind of dryness. Contact comes from pressing the two layers between thumb and forefinger hard and briefly, straight down rather than with a twist, so the dough is compressed to roughly half the thickness it had. Dryness comes from the formula. This dough carries less free water than almost any other fried pastry in Italy, because most of its liquid is wine and the flour and the alcohol take up a share of what little water that wine brings, so the pressed faces knit instead of sliding apart on a film of moisture. The wine also keeps the sheet extensible enough to roll paper thin without splitting along the scalloped edge.

The hour of rest and the overnight drying finish the job, and they pull in opposite directions. The rest slackens the gluten so a strip 14 inches long can be wound into a tight spiral without straightening itself out again. The drying stiffens that wound shape until it behaves like a rigid object, which is what allows moderate oil to set the outside before the pressure inside reaches its peak. Leave out either one and the rose will look perfect on the tray and open like a fan in the pan.

Texture and Moisture Control

Crispness in cartellate is not made in the fryer. It is made in the twelve hours before it. Frying converts water to steam and sets what is already there, and the roses go into the oil with perhaps half the moisture they had when shaped, so the layers puff a little, dry through quickly and set brittle rather than chewy.

Oil temperature governs colour and interior at the same time. At 330°F (165°C) the pastry has three minutes to dry through before the surface takes on much colour, which is exactly what these thin, tightly wound folds need. Hotter oil colours the outside while the centre of the coil is still soft, and that cartellata goes limp as it cools on the rack.

The last moisture decision is the coat. Vincotto is a concentrated sugar syrup and it is hygroscopic: left thick on the pastry it pulls moisture out of the air and out of the dough under it. The brief dip, the long drain on a rack and the loose lid on the tin all exist to keep that coat thin. Sealed in an airtight box while the syrup is still wet, the crispest batch you ever fried will be leathery by morning.

Professional Mise en Place

Equipment and tools

A pasta machine or a long rolling pin, a fluted pastry wheel, a bench scraper, three flat trays lined with clean cloths, a deep heavy pot holding at least 3 inches (8 cm) of oil, a probe thermometer, long tongs, a wire rack set over a tray, and a tin with a loose lid.

Prepared ahead

The dough can be made a day early and kept wrapped in the refrigerator, then brought back to cool room temperature for an hour before rolling. Shaping and drying happen the day before serving, without exception. Fried, uncoated roses hold three days in a tin. Vincotto keeps for months, and the almonds can be toasted and chopped a week ahead.

Service setup

Set the fryer, the cooling rack and the vincotto pan in a line so a rose never travels backwards. Fry in batches of three or four, cool completely, then dip. Keep the coated ones on racks until the syrup has set, and build the pile only at the last moment.

Chef Tips

Cut and shape only a few strips at a time. A strip left lying while you work through a batch will not pinch properly, and the roses shaped last are always the ones that unwind in the oil.
Use the wine warm and measure it rather than pouring by eye. Two extra tablespoons turn a dough you can roll paper thin into one that sticks to the pin and tears along the scalloped edge.
Fry one rose on its own before the first batch. It tells you the oil temperature, the timing and whether your pinches hold, and it costs a single pastry instead of a tray.
If vincotto is nowhere to be found, reduce 3 cups (720 ml) of dark grape juice with two dried figs to one third of its volume and add a squeeze of lemon. It is not vincotto, but it is far closer than caramel or maple syrup.

Common Mistakes

Frying the roses the same day they are shaped. Twelve hours of drying is a structural step, not a resting suggestion. A pliable rose has nothing to hold its spiral against the steam pressure inside it, so it swells, loosens and arrives at the table as a flat fried ribbon.

Rolling the dough too thick. At 1/8 inch (3 mm) the pastry fries hard rather than brittle and the fluted edge disappears. You should be able to see the grain of the bench through the sheet before you cut it, and the strips should feel like ribbon, not like pasta.

Taking the colour too far. Deep gold looks right on most fried sweets and is wrong here. These folds are thin enough that the last thirty seconds of colour brings a burnt note the vincotto cannot cover. Pull them at pale straw.

Dipping the pastry while it is warm, or the syrup while it is hot. Either mistake ends the same way. Heat opens the pastry to the syrup, the coat soaks in instead of sitting on top, and the crispness that twelve hours of drying bought you is gone in twenty minutes.

Wine Pairing

Moscato d'Asti DOCG: The gentlest match on the list and the one to pour when the cartellate are finished with honey. Low alcohol and a soft fizz lift the fried pastry off the palate, while its orange blossom aromatics run alongside the citrus zest in the dough. Its sweetness stays below the syrup, so nothing turns cloying.

Vin Santo del Chianti Classico DOC: Oxidative, nutty and only moderately sweet, with enough acidity to cut olive oil. It reads of almonds, dried fig and orange peel, the exact register of a cartellata finished with chopped almonds. Serve it cool, around 55°F (13°C), so the alcohol does not collide with the sugar.

Malvasia delle Lipari DOC: The closest wine here to fig vincotto itself: dried fig, raisin, honey and a saline tang off the Aeolian volcanic soils. Because it echoes the coat instead of contrasting with it, pour small measures. Its freshness keeps the pairing from becoming syrup on syrup, as a heavier passito would.

Marsala DOC: A Superiore Dolce has the structure to stand up to a whole plate of fried pastry. The fortification brings a light bitterness on the finish that scrubs the palate between pieces, and its caramel and walnut notes meet the cooked must without imitating it.

Ramandolo DOCG: The acid driven choice from Friuli, where the firm grip of Verduzzo works here like a squeeze of citrus. It carries apricot and honey over a stony bite that resets the mouth after the oil. The best bottle on this list for anyone who finds dessert wines heavy.

Storage & Reheating

Uncoated cartellate keep best. In a tin with a loose lid, in a dry cupboard, they stay crisp for two weeks and are still good at three. Coated in vincotto they hold about five days, and they want that same loose tin rather than a sealed container, with a sheet of baking paper between the layers so the syrup does not glue them into a block. Do not refrigerate them: the cold stiffens the coat and the damp air inside a refrigerator softens the pastry. Coated roses do not freeze well, though the raw dough freezes for two months wrapped tight. If a batch has gone soft, spread the pieces on a tray and give them 6 to 8 minutes in a 300°F (150°C) oven, then cool them completely before serving. They come back most of the way.