Sicilian Cassata with Ricotta, Pistachio and Citrus | Cassata Siciliana Rivisitata
This cassata has no marzipan. The green almond wall that every Palermo pastry window shows you is gone, and with it goes the only part of the classic cake that was doing structural work. What is left has to hold itself up, which changes the ricotta cream completely and turns the dessert into an exercise in water, fat and cold.
Everything else stays Sicilian: sheep ricotta, Bronte pistachio, candied orange, cinnamon, a thin pan di Spagna underneath. The flavour is the cassata you know. The engineering is not.
Yield: 10 servings, one 8 inch (20 cm) cake. Prep: 1 hour. Draining: 12 hours. Bake: 20 minutes. Chill to set: 6 hours minimum. Total: about 20 hours with most of it unattended. Difficulty: advanced. Course: dolce. Region: Sicily, Palermo and the Bronte slopes of Etna.
The Story
Cassata is an Arab cake that stayed in Sicily after the Arabs left. Ricotta sweetened with cane sugar was a Palermo street food under the Emirate, and both the sugar cane and the technique of working sugar to a paste arrived with the same ships. The name itself is argued over: quas'at, the deep bowl in which the cheese was pressed and shaped, is the derivation most Sicilian food historians accept, though the Latin caseus, cheese, has its defenders. Either way the first cassata was closer to a bowl of sweetened ricotta than to a cake, eaten in the Kalsa quarter at the end of Lent when ewes were milking again and ricotta was cheap and everywhere.
The convents turned it into architecture. Pasta reale, the almond and sugar paste Palermo still calls frutta martorana, was made by the nuns of the Martorana, and at some point between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries somebody used it to line the bowl instead of merely decorating the top. That is when the cassata became a sealed object with a shell. By 1575 the diocesan synod of Mazara del Vallo recorded it as indispensable at Easter, and Sicilian dialect kept the judgement in a proverb: tavola senza cassata, fimmina senza criata, a table without cassata is like a woman without a maid.
The version photographed in every guidebook is younger than people assume. Salvatore Gulì, a Palermo pastry chef, fixed it in 1873: the almond shell tinted green with pistachio, the white sugar glaze poured over the top, the candied fruit laid out in a formal pattern, the zuccata made from candied cucuzza squash. He showed it in Vienna and it became the official portrait of the dish. This recipe steps back from that portrait rather than the older cake. Take the almond shell off and you are closer to the Kalsa bowl than to Gulì, and you are left with the same problem the nuns solved by building a wall: how do you keep sweetened ricotta standing up.
Ingredients
For the pan di Spagna base
Eggs, at room temperature, 3
Granulated sugar, 1/2 cup (100 g)
All purpose flour, 1/3 cup (45 g)
Potato starch, 1/4 cup (35 g)
Finely grated lemon zest, from 1 lemon
Fine sea salt, 1 small pinch
For the self supporting ricotta cream
Sheep milk ricotta, 2 lb 3 oz (1 kg) before draining, about 1 lb 5 oz (600 g) after
Powdered sugar, sifted, 1 cup (120 g)
White chocolate, at least 30 percent cocoa butter, 3 oz (85 g)
Mascarpone, cold, 3 oz (85 g)
Candied orange peel, diced small, 2 oz (55 g)
Dark chocolate, chopped to the size of rice grains, 1 1/2 oz (40 g)
Shelled Bronte pistachios, chopped, 1 1/2 oz (40 g)
Finely grated orange zest, from 1 orange
Ground cinnamon, 1 pinch
For moistening the sponge
Fresh orange juice, strained, 3 tbsp (45 ml)
Fresh lemon juice, 1 tsp (5 ml)
Powdered sugar, 1 tsp (4 g)
For finishing
Shelled Bronte pistachios, finely chopped, 3 oz (85 g)
Candied orange peel cut into strips, 1 1/2 oz (40 g)
Whole pistachios, 10
Preparation
Step 1
Drain the ricotta cold. Line a sieve with a double layer of cheesecloth, set it over a bowl, tip in the ricotta, fold the cloth over and put a small plate and a full can on top. Refrigerate 12 hours. Never warm it to speed this up: heat squeezes the curd and leaves a grainy cheese that weeps later. Weigh the whey that comes out, roughly a third of the starting weight, because that number predicts whether the cake will stand.
Step 2
Bake the pan di Spagna. Heat the oven to 350°F (175°C) and line an 8 inch (20 cm) pan. Whip the eggs, sugar, lemon zest and salt for 8 to 10 minutes until pale and tripled. Sift the flour and potato starch together and fold them in by hand in three additions, stopping the moment the streaks disappear. Bake 20 minutes, cool completely, then split the sponge horizontally into two thin discs with a serrated knife.
Step 3
Toast and grind the pistachios. Spread the finishing pistachios and the 1 1/2 oz for the cream on a tray and give them 6 minutes at 325°F (165°C), until they smell sweet but are still vividly green. Cool them completely. Chop the finishing quantity to a coarse crumb, not a powder, since a crumb catches light on the side of the cake while a powder looks like dust. Chop the cream quantity a little finer.
Step 4
Pass the ricotta and melt the chocolate. Push the drained ricotta through a fine mesh sieve once, into a cold bowl, and beat in the powdered sugar until smooth. Melt the white chocolate over a bain marie and let it come down to 95°F (35°C), no cooler or it will thicken on contact. Stir 4 tbsp of the sweetened ricotta into the chocolate quickly, then return that mixture to the main bowl and fold until uniform.
Step 5
Build the cream and test whether it stands. Fold in the cold mascarpone, then the orange zest, cinnamon, candied peel, dark chocolate and chopped pistachios. Now test it. Drag a spatula through the middle: the walls of the channel must stay vertical for a slow count of ten without slumping. A spoonful held upside down must not drop. If either test fails, refrigerate 20 minutes and retest rather than adding more sugar, which would draw out more liquid and make the problem worse.
Step 6
Assemble inside a ring. Set an 8 inch (20 cm) cake ring on a flat board lined with parchment and line the inside with a strip of acetate. Whisk the juices with the powdered sugar and brush the first sponge disc very lightly, just enough to scent it. Lay it in, spread two thirds of the cream over it, add the second disc, then the rest of the cream flush with the ring. Smooth the top with an offset spatula in one pass.
Step 7
Chill, unring and dress the side. Refrigerate at 39°F (4°C) for 6 hours, or overnight if you have it. Lift the ring straight up, peel the acetate away and check the edge: it should be square and matte, with no bulge at the base. Press the pistachio crumb onto the side with the flat of your palm, then arrange the candied orange strips and whole pistachios on top. Refrigerate again until the moment it is cut.
Plating
This cake is served cold from the refrigerator and nothing about that is negotiable. Fat is the only thing holding it together, so take it out, cut it and plate it, then put the rest straight back. Twenty minutes in a warm room is enough for the cut faces to soften and the edges to round off.
Cut with a thin bladed knife dipped in hot water and wiped dry before every single slice. A wet blade smears ricotta across the face of the cut and drags the pistachio crumb inward. Ten portions from an 8 inch cake gives a wedge that stands on the plate. Use cold plates, never warmed ones, and set the wedge upright with the pistachio side facing the diner so the layers read. No sauce, no cream, no dusting of sugar: the glaze belonged to the shell, and the shell is not here.
Professional Technique
Marzipan on a classic cassata is not decoration, it is a load bearing wall. A band of almond paste 1/8 inch thick, pressed against the inside of the mould, holds a vertical face on its own and lets the pastry chef get away with a soft, loose filling, because that filling is never asked to keep a shape. Remove that wall and the cream becomes the wall. There are only two levers available and neither involves gelatin: take water out, and put in fat that crystallizes at refrigerator temperature.
Draining does the first job and the white chocolate does the second. Cocoa butter is solid and brittle below about 64°F (18°C) and sets into a fine crystal network through the cheese, so a cream with 3 oz of it in a kilo of ricotta behaves like a firm mousse cold and like a loose cream warm. Mascarpone adds milk fat that stiffens the same way. This is why the cream is tested and not assumed: judge it by behaviour, since the same weights give a different cream from one ricotta to the next.
The ring is the replacement mould, and it is temporary. Without a casing there is nothing to give a vertical edge while the fat crystallizes, so the ring holds the shape for the six hours in which the structure forms and is then removed. Fat crystallization is reversible, which is the whole reason a cassata without a shell is a refrigerated cake and a classic cassata is not. Warm it and it goes soft again, every time, with no damage and no recovery.
Texture and Moisture Control
Water is the enemy from the first hour to the last. Fresh sheep ricotta is roughly 70 percent water, and every gram left in the curd is a gram the fat network has to suspend. Draining cold under light weight for 12 hours removes about a third of the starting weight without compacting the curd, which is what keeps the finished cream smooth rather than chalky. Weigh the whey. Losing much less than 11 oz (310 g) from a kilo means the cream will not pass the channel test, and the answer is more time in the cloth, not more sugar.
Then keep new water out. The sponge is brushed with a few tablespoons of citrus juice and no more, because there is no shell to contain what runs out of it, and free liquid pooling at the base is what produces the slumped rim you see on a cassata that has been over moistened. Sugar is a second source of moisture: it dissolves and pulls liquid from the curd, so the powdered sugar goes in early and is never increased late. Finally, condensation. A cake brought out and left to sit beads on its surface, and those beads dissolve the pistachio crumb into a paste.
Professional Mise en Place
The work is front loaded and the passive time is long, so plan backwards from service: 12 hours of draining, then an hour of work, then 6 hours of setting.
Equipment and tools
8 inch (20 cm) cake ring plus a strip of acetate, and an 8 inch cake pan for the sponge
Fine mesh sieve, double cheesecloth, a small plate and a weight
Digital scale that reads to 1 gram, and an instant read thermometer
Offset spatula, thin bladed slicing knife, serrated knife for splitting the sponge
Prepared ahead
Ricotta draining in the refrigerator, 12 hours ahead, whey weighed and recorded
Pan di Spagna baked up to 2 days ahead, wrapped whole and split on the day
Pistachios toasted and chopped on the day, kept in a sealed jar away from steam
Candied orange diced and dark chocolate chopped before the cream is started
Service setup
Cake finished and held at 39°F (4°C), brought out only to be cut
Jug of hot water and a clean dry cloth at the cutting station
Plates cold, never warmed, lined up before the first cut
Chef Tips
Buy ricotta di pecora from a counter that sells it loose and by weight. Tubbed cow ricotta carries stabilizers and more water, tastes flatter against the candied orange, and drains unpredictably, which is exactly the variable you cannot afford here.
Choose the white chocolate by its cocoa butter figure and not by its price. Anything below about 30 percent is padded out with milk solids and vegetable fat, and vegetable fat sets waxy on the palate instead of crisp. Read the label before you buy.
Chop the dark chocolate by hand to the size of rice grains rather than using chips. Chips are engineered to hold their shape and eat like pebbles in a cold cream, while hand cut fragments give the same bitter punctuation and melt away.
Write the drained weight on a piece of tape on the bowl. When a cake comes out looser than it should, that one number tells you immediately whether the fault was the draining or the assembly, and you will know what to change next time.
Common Mistakes
Skipping the draining because the ricotta looks dry. It is holding water in the curd that only pressure and time release. An undrained cream passes no test and slumps into a dome within an hour of leaving the ring.
Adding the white chocolate straight from the bain marie. Hot chocolate meeting cold ricotta seizes into hard specks that no amount of folding will smooth out. Bring it to 95°F (35°C) and temper it with a few spoons of the sweetened ricotta first.
Soaking the sponge. With no shell to contain it, liquid collects under the cake and the base bulges outward. A light brushing to scent the crumb is all it takes.
Serving it at room temperature. Cold fat is the only structure here. Left out it softens, the cut faces round over and the pistachio side slides, so cut it straight from the refrigerator.
Correcting a loose cream with more sugar. Sugar dissolves, draws more liquid out of the curd and makes the cream looser still while also making it cloying. Chill it for 20 minutes and test it again instead.
Wine Pairing
Malvasia delle Lipari DOC: The first choice and the most Sicilian one. Dried on mats in the Aeolian sun, it carries apricot, dried fig and orange peel, and that candied citrus note lands directly on the candied orange in the cream. It is sweet without being heavy, with a lifted acidity that cuts the cocoa butter and the sheep milk fat instead of piling richness on richness.
Moscato di Noto DOC: A rarity from the Val di Noto, aromatic and lighter in body than the Malvasia. Its orange blossom and sage perfume sits beside the orange zest rather than competing with it, and the modest alcohol keeps the pairing gentle. Serve it at 46°F (8°C), so its acidity stays tight against a dessert served just as cold.
Marsala DOC: The structural partner, and the one to reach for if the cake feels rich. A Superiore Dolce brings fortified weight, walnut and caramel from oxidative ageing, and enough alcohol to scour milk fat off the palate between mouthfuls. Its roasted nut character runs alongside the toasted pistachio, and the bitter edge on the finish answers the fragments of dark chocolate.
Vin Santo del Chianti Classico DOC: The mainland alternative when no Sicilian bottle is at hand. Dried Malvasia and Trebbiano aged in small barrels give almond, dried apricot and a faintly resinous finish, and the almond in particular fills the space the missing marzipan used to occupy. Its firm acidity handles the sweetened ricotta, and it stays dry enough on the finish never to read as syrup.
Storage & Reheating
Nothing here is ever reheated. The finished cake keeps 3 days at 39°F (4°C), loosely covered with a dome rather than film, which would stick to the cream and lift the pistachio off the side. It is best on the second day, once the sponge and the cream have equalized. After the third day the candied orange starts to bleed colour into the cream and the pistachio crumb goes soft.
The cake freezes well if you freeze it before it is dressed. Set it, unring it, wrap it twice and freeze for up to 1 month, then thaw overnight in the refrigerator and press the pistachio on afterwards. Never thaw it at room temperature, because the fat network softens faster than the interior and the sides sag. Undressed cream keeps 2 days in a sealed container. Spare pan di Spagna freezes for 1 month, wrapped whole.
Nutrition
Per serving, based on 10 portions:
Calories: 425 kcal
Total Fat: 24 g
Saturated Fat: 13 g
Trans Fat: 0 g
Unsaturated Fat: 10 g
Cholesterol: 95 mg
Sodium: 135 mg
Total Carbohydrates: 40 g
Fiber: 1.5 g
Total Sugars: 31 g
Added Sugars: 22 g
Protein: 13 g
Lactose: 4 g
Principal micronutrients: calcium, phosphorus, vitamin A, vitamin B2, vitamin E, potassium, magnesium
These figures are estimates. The whey discarded during draining carries away part of the lactose and the sodium, so both sit lower than the raw weights suggest.
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