Italian Honey Cartellate | Cartellate Lucane al Miele
Updated: Sep 14
Cartellate are made of almost nothing. Flour, wine, olive oil and salt, rolled out and fried and coated, with no sugar in the dough, no eggs, no butter and no leavening. Everything that makes them worth eating happens in two places instead: in the hands that shape the ribbon into a coiled rose, and in the temperature of the honey they are dipped into at the end. Get either one wrong and you have a plate of fried dough in syrup.
The shaping is a timed operation more than a skill. A strip of dough folded over on itself and pinched at intervals will only seal while the sheet is still supple; ten minutes later the surface has dried just enough that the pinches let go in the pan and the rose unwinds into a ribbon. Once shaped, the opposite is true and the roses have to dry for the best part of a day before they meet hot oil, or they blister, soften and collapse. Supple to shape, bone dry to fry, in that order.
The honey is the other half. Honey at frying heat is thin as water and runs straight into the fried layers, leaving a heavy, saturated, cloying pastry. Honey barely warmed is a sticky mass that clings in one lump on the side that touched it and leaves the rest bare. There is a narrow band between those two failures, roughly 105°F to 120°F (40°C to 49°C), where the honey is fluid enough to run into every fold and thick enough to stay on the surface as a thin gloss. That band is the recipe.
Yield: about 40 cartellate, 8 servings. Prep: 1 hour 15 minutes. Drying: 12 to 24 hours. Cook: 40 minutes. Total: about 15 hours including the drying. Difficulty: intermediate, with a demanding shaping stage. Course: dessert. Region: Basilicata and Puglia, made for Christmas.
The Story
These pastries belong to the Christmas table of Basilicata and Puglia and to almost nowhere else, and the border between the two regions runs straight through them. In the Materano and the Vulture they are cartellate and they are more often dipped in vincotto di fichi, the dark syrup boiled down from fig must in late summer and kept for exactly this purpose. Across the boundary in the Bari province the same shape appears under the same name and goes more often into honey. Both versions are correct, and families argue about it with real conviction.
The name most likely comes from the Greek kartallos, a basket of woven reed, which is what the coiled rose actually resembles, and the Greek connection is not fanciful in a region that was Magna Graecia for centuries. The shape carries religious readings too, depending on who is telling you: the swaddling bands of the infant, the halo above the crib, the crown of thorns that comes later. Southern Christmas baking is full of this kind of layered meaning and cartellate carry more of it than most.
Practically, they exist because they keep. A dough with no egg and no dairy, rolled thin, dried, fried and then sealed under a coat of honey or vincotto will sit in a tin through the whole of the Christmas season without spoiling, which mattered enormously in an inland region of hard winters and no refrigeration. They were made in quantity in the days before Christmas, by several women working together because the shaping is slow, and they were brought out for every visitor from the Immacolata on the eighth of December through to the Epiphany. The recipe below is that same dough and that same method, written with the two temperatures that families judge by eye stated in numbers instead.
Ingredients
For the dough
All purpose flour, 3 1/2 cups (440 g), plus more for rolling
Dry white wine, warmed to 105°F (40°C), 1/2 cup (120 ml)
Extra virgin olive oil, 1/4 cup (60 ml)
Warm water, 2 to 4 tbsp (30 to 60 ml), as the flour takes it
Fine sea salt, 1/2 tsp (3 g)
Finely grated orange zest, from 1 orange
For frying
Peanut oil or a mild olive oil, 6 cups (1.4 L), enough for 2 1/2 inches (6 cm) in the pan
For the honey dip
Orange blossom or wildflower honey, 1 1/2 cups (500 g)
Water, 2 tbsp (30 ml)
Strip of orange peel, 1, pared with no pith
For finishing
Almonds, toasted and roughly chopped, 1/3 cup (45 g)
Ground cinnamon, 1/4 tsp (0.5 g)
Coloured sugar nonpareils, diavolilli, 2 tbsp (25 g), optional
For the Lucanian version, replace the honey with 1 1/2 cups (360 ml) of vincotto di fichi, warmed the same way. Vincotto is thinner than honey at every temperature, so reduce it gently for about 10 minutes first until it coats a spoon, and dip more briefly. The finished pastries come out darker, less sweet and considerably more interesting, with a raisin and fig depth that honey does not give.
Preparation
Work the dough until it is smooth and elastic
Put the flour, salt and orange zest in a wide bowl and make a well. Pour in the warm wine and the olive oil and bring the flour in gradually with a fork, then turn it out and knead by hand for a full 10 minutes, adding warm water a spoonful at a time only if the dough refuses to come together. You want a firm dough, noticeably drier than a pasta dough and much drier than a bread dough, that is smooth and springy by the end. Warm wine matters: cold wine makes a dough that fights you for the first five minutes and never fully relaxes.
Rest the dough under a bowl
Shape it into a ball, cover it with an inverted bowl rather than plastic, and leave it on the counter for 30 to 40 minutes. This is not a proof, it is a gluten relaxation, and skipping it is the most common reason a sheet springs back every time you try to roll it thin. An inverted bowl holds the humidity of the dough around it without sweating condensation onto the surface the way wrapped plastic does.
Roll the sheet to translucency
Work with a quarter of the dough at a time and keep the rest under the bowl. Roll it out, or run it through a pasta machine stepping down to the second thinnest setting, until the sheet is about 1/16 inch (1.5 mm) and you can just make out the shape of your hand through it. Thicker than that and the finished rose is bready and dense in the middle. Thinner and the pinches tear rather than seal. Flour the bench only lightly, because excess flour on the surface is exactly what stops the pinches from holding.
Cut the fluted strips
With a fluted pastry wheel, cut the sheet into long strips about 1 1/4 inches (3 cm) wide. The fluting is not decoration alone: the scalloped edge gives the honey something to sit in later and makes a visible difference to how much of it stays on the pastry. Cut only as many strips as you can shape in the next few minutes and leave the rest of the sheet covered with a cloth.
Pinch the pockets
Take one strip and fold it in half lengthwise, bringing the two long edges together but not creasing the fold flat. Every 1 1/2 inches (4 cm) along its length, pinch the two edges firmly together between thumb and forefinger, pressing hard enough to weld them. Between the pinches the strip opens into a small pocket. If the edges will not stick, dip a fingertip in water and touch each pinch point before pressing, but use as little water as you can get away with.
Coil each strip into a rose
Starting at one end, wind the pinched strip into a loose spiral, laying each turn just outside the last and letting the pockets face upward and outward. Press the outer end gently into the previous turn to close the coil. Aim for a rose of about 2 1/2 inches (6 cm) across with visible gaps between the turns, not a tight disc. The gaps are where the honey runs in, and a rose wound too tightly gives a pastry that is dry at the centre no matter how long you dip it.
Dry the shaped roses
Lay the finished roses on clean cloths or floured trays, not touching, and leave them uncovered at room temperature, 65°F to 70°F (18°C to 21°C), for 12 to 24 hours, turning them once halfway through. They should feel dry and papery and sound faintly hollow when tapped. This is the stage that people skip and it is the stage that decides whether the shape survives the pan. A rose fried while still soft loses its pinches within seconds and flattens into a spiral of ribbon.
Fry in small batches
Heat the oil to 340°F (170°C) and check it with a thermometer rather than guessing. Fry four or five roses at a time, turning them once, for about 2 minutes in total until they are pale gold and crisp, not brown. Cartellate carry no sugar in the dough, so they colour slowly and it is easy to leave them in too long chasing a colour that a sweet dough would have reached in half the time. Lift them out with a skimmer and stand them on a rack, never on paper, so air reaches both faces.
Bring the honey to dipping temperature
Put the honey, the water and the strip of orange peel in a wide shallow pan and warm it very gently with a thermometer in it until it reaches 115°F (46°C), then pull it off the heat and hold it between 105°F and 120°F (40°C and 49°C), returning it briefly to a low flame whenever it drops. Do not let it simmer and do not take it above 150°F (65°C). Above that the honey thins out, changes flavour, and is absorbed into the pastry instead of coating it.
Dip, drain and finish
The cartellate must be completely cool before they are dipped, or steam still leaving the pastry will push the honey off. Hold each rose with tongs, lower it into the honey, turn it once so the pockets fill, and lift it out. Let it hang over the pan for a good 15 seconds so the excess runs back, then set it on a rack over a tray. Scatter the chopped almonds, the cinnamon and the nonpareils on while the honey is still wet. Leave them to set for 2 hours before stacking them.
Plating
Cartellate are a communal sweet and they are presented in volume rather than portioned. Pile them on a broad shallow dish or a wooden board in a single loose layer with the coiled faces upward, because the spiral is the whole visual point and a heaped mound hides it. Five per person is a normal serving at the end of a Christmas meal, and they are eaten with the fingers.
Serve them at room temperature and never warm. Warmth softens the fried layers and makes the honey run, and within a few minutes the pastries are sitting in a puddle and have lost their crispness. If the room is very cold, bring them out half an hour ahead so the honey coating loses its stiffness, but no more than that.
What goes beside them is a matter of regional habit. In Basilicata a small glass of amaro or a cold sweet wine is standard, and a bowl of dried figs, walnuts and clementines usually sits on the same table. Avoid anything creamy: cartellate depend on a contrast between crisp dry pastry and sweet coating, and cream collapses that contrast on contact.
Professional Technique
The whole difficulty of cartellate sits in one narrow window during shaping. A freshly rolled sheet has moisture at its surface and relaxed gluten underneath, and in that state two edges pressed together weld into a single piece of dough. Within roughly ten minutes of exposure to air the surface dehydrates into a thin skin, and from that point a pinch is a mechanical fold rather than a bond. It will look identical on the tray and it will spring open in the oil. This is why the dough is rolled in quarters and cut a few strips at a time, and why shaping cartellate is traditionally done by three or four people at once rather than one person working through a whole batch.
Hydration is the lever that widens that window. This dough is deliberately dry, around 40 percent hydration counting the wine, which is what gives the fried pastry its brittleness and lets it keep for weeks. But a very dry dough also skins over fastest. The practical compromise is to keep the dough slightly on the softer side of firm, knead it long enough that the gluten is fully developed and the surface is silky, and keep every portion you are not actively working covered. A dusting of flour on the bench helps you roll and actively hurts the pinch, so use the least you can.
The drying stage that follows is the inverse problem and it is about structural rigidity rather than adhesion. Over 12 to 24 hours the shaped rose loses enough free water that the gluten network sets into a rigid scaffold, and when that scaffold hits 340°F (170°C) oil it holds its geometry while the remaining moisture flashes to steam and puffs the layers apart. A rose that goes into the pan still pliable has no scaffold, so the steam simply inflates and distorts it and the coil relaxes outward. Twelve hours is the minimum in dry weather. In a damp kitchen give them the full day and turn them twice.
Texture and Moisture Control
Honey viscosity is the single most consequential variable at the end of this recipe, and it changes dramatically with a few degrees. At room temperature honey is around ten thousand times more viscous than water and will not flow into a folded pocket at all, so a cold dip coats one face in a thick lump and leaves the interior of the rose bare. Heated past 150°F (65°C) it becomes thin and mobile enough to wick into the porous fried structure by capillary action, and a pastry that has drunk honey rather than worn it is soggy within the hour and sickly to eat. Between 105°F and 120°F (40°C and 49°C) it runs freely into the gaps and then stays put as a thin film. Keep the thermometer in the pan and stop guessing.
The pastry itself has to be genuinely dry when it goes in. Frying at 340°F (170°C) drives the free water out as steam and leaves a fried layer of around 2 percent moisture, which is what gives the crack. A rose lifted out of the oil is still venting steam for several minutes, and honey applied during that time is pushed off from underneath and sits in beads that slide away. Twenty minutes on a rack is the minimum wait, and a rack rather than paper is what stops the underside from steaming itself soft while the top cools.
After the dip, moisture moves slowly from the honey into the pastry no matter what you do, and that migration is what limits how far ahead these can be made. Coated cartellate keep their crispness for about five days and are noticeably softer by ten. An uncoated fried rose stored in a tin stays crisp for three weeks and can be dipped on the day you want it, which is what most Lucanian households actually do once the first batch has been eaten. Never store them in the refrigerator, where the humidity softens them within a day.
Professional Mise en Place
This is a two day preparation with a long unattended gap in the middle. Shaping is the labour, and it wants a clear bench, a cool room and, if possible, a second pair of hands. The frying and dipping on the following day take under an hour.
Equipment and tools
Fluted pastry wheel, the single tool that cannot be substituted
Rolling pin or a pasta machine with the setting stepped down to the second thinnest
Two or three large trays and clean cotton cloths for the drying stage
Deep heavy pan for frying and a probe thermometer for the oil
Wide shallow pan for the honey and a second thermometer for the dip
Skimmer or spider, long tongs, and two cooling racks set over trays
Prepared ahead
Dough made, kneaded and rested, the day before shaping
Roses shaped and laid out to dry, 12 to 24 hours before frying
Almonds toasted and chopped, cinnamon measured, up to 3 days ahead
Orange peel pared and honey weighed into its pan, on the day
Fried and undipped cartellate, up to 3 weeks ahead in a sealed tin
Service setup
Oil holding at 340°F (170°C), checked between every batch
Honey pan warm beside the fryer, held between 105°F and 120°F (40°C and 49°C)
Racks over trays for both the fried roses and the dipped ones, kept separate
Almonds, cinnamon and nonpareils in open bowls within reach of the dipping station
A cool dry surface where the finished pastries can set undisturbed for 2 hours
Chef Tips
Shape with someone else. The bottleneck in this recipe is entirely human, since the sheet skins over faster than one person can cut, pinch and coil a whole quarter of dough. Two people working from one sheet, one cutting and pinching and one coiling, will produce roses that hold together far more reliably than one person working alone at twice the speed.
Test the pinch before you commit to a batch. Shape a single rose, let it dry for an hour and drop it into the oil. If it opens out, the dough is either too dry at the surface or too lightly pinched, and you will learn that in two minutes instead of discovering it with forty roses already made.
Fry the ugliest roses first. The oil takes a few minutes to settle into a steady temperature and the first batch is always the one that comes out palest or darkest. Put the misshapen ones in at the start, taste one, adjust the heat, and keep the best looking roses for the middle of the run when the pan is behaving.
If the honey seizes or crystallises in the pan during dipping, add a teaspoon of hot water and stir it through off the heat rather than raising the flame. More heat pushes it past the temperature band and into the pastry, while a little water restores the flow without changing the coating thickness noticeably.
Common Mistakes
Rolling the whole batch of dough out at once. By the time you reach the last strips the sheet has skinned over and the pinches no longer bond, so a third of the roses unwind in the pan. Roll a quarter of the dough at a time and keep the rest covered.
Frying the roses before they are properly dried. A pliable rose has no rigid gluten scaffold, so the steam generated in the oil distorts it and the coil flattens into a ribbon within seconds. Give them 12 hours minimum, and a full day in humid weather.
Dipping in honey that is too hot. Past 150°F (65°C) honey becomes thin enough to wick into the fried layers by capillary action, and the pastry turns heavy and saturated instead of crisp under a gloss. Keep it between 105°F and 120°F (40°C and 49°C) with a thermometer in the pan.
Dipping the cartellate while they are still warm. Steam leaving the pastry pushes the honey off from underneath and it slides away in beads. Let them cool completely on a rack for at least 20 minutes before any of them go near the honey.
Rolling the sheet too thick. Anything much over 1/16 inch (1.5 mm) fries into a bready, dense pastry that stays chewy at the centre of the coil. The sheet should be thin enough that you can see the outline of your hand through it.
Winding the coil too tightly. A tight disc has nowhere for the honey to run in, so the middle of the rose stays bare and dry. Lay each turn just outside the last and leave visible gaps between them.
Using too much flour on the bench. Surface flour is precisely what prevents two edges from welding together when you pinch them. Flour lightly, brush the excess off the strip before folding it, and dampen a fingertip instead if the edges resist.
Wine Pairing
Primitivo di Manduria DOC: Look specifically for the Dolce Naturale, the sweet version made from grapes left to raisin on the vine in the Salento heat. Its dried fig, prune and warm spice profile lands on the same notes as the vincotto version of this pastry, and it carries enough alcoholic weight and soft tannin to stand beside a fried dough without seeming thin. Pour it at 61°F (16°C).
Malvasia Bianca di Basilicata IGT: The local bottle and the one poured at the tables these pastries actually come from, grown on the volcanic soils around the Vulture. In its lightly sweet, faintly frizzante form it gives apricot, white flowers and a soft grapey aromatic lift, with a low alcohol that lets you drink it through a long Christmas afternoon. The gentle carbon dioxide lifts the honey coating off the palate between pastries.
Matera Greco DOC: The dry choice for anyone who does not want a sweet wine with dessert, and it works better here than it has any right to. Grown on the limestone around Matera, it brings a firm mineral acidity, yellow stone fruit and a distinctly bitter almond finish that meets the chopped almonds on top of the pastry directly. Serve it cold at 46°F (8°C) so the acidity stays sharp against the honey.
Locorotondo DOC: The Verdeca based white of the Valle d'Itria, pale, delicate and low in alcohol, and a deliberately understated partner. It has almost no fruit sweetness of its own, which means it refreshes rather than competes, and its faint herbal and citrus peel character picks up the orange zest in the dough. A good bottle for the moment late in the evening when a heavier wine would be unwelcome.
Storage & Reheating
Coated cartellate are kept at room temperature in a tin or a cardboard box, layered between sheets of parchment so the honey does not glue them into a single mass, and they hold their crispness for about 5 days. They are still perfectly good at 10 days but noticeably softer, which is the moisture from the coating slowly working its way inward. A rigid tin is better than a plastic container, which traps the small amount of vapour they continue to give off.
Fried but undipped roses are the better thing to store, and this is what families in Basilicata do through December. Kept in a sealed tin in a dry cupboard they stay properly brittle for up to 3 weeks, and you warm a little honey and dip only as many as you need. If a batch has gone slightly soft in a humid week, spread them on a tray and give them 5 minutes at 300°F (150°C), then cool them completely before dipping. That refreshes undipped pastries only and does nothing for coated ones.
Freezing is possible for the undipped roses, which survive 2 months in a rigid container with parchment between the layers and must be thawed uncovered at room temperature for an hour before the oven refresh above. Do not freeze them once they are coated, because the honey weeps on thawing and the surface turns granular. Never refrigerate them at any stage, dipped or not, since the humidity inside a refrigerator softens the fried layers within a day and there is no recovering the texture afterwards.
Nutrition
Per serving, based on 8 servings of about 5 cartellate each:
Calories: 420 kcal
Total Fat: 15 g
Saturated Fat: 2.2 g
Trans Fat: 0 g
Unsaturated Fat: 12.5 g
Cholesterol: 0 mg
Sodium: 155 mg
Total Carbohydrates: 68 g
Fiber: 2 g
Total Sugars: 40 g
Added Sugars: 38 g
Protein: 6 g
Lactose: 0 g
Principal micronutrients: vitamin E, iron, magnesium, manganese, selenium, folate, niacin
These figures are estimates and the fat number is the least reliable of them, since how much frying oil a batch absorbs depends almost entirely on how accurately the temperature was held. Oil that drops below 320°F (160°C) can double the figure above. The recipe as written contains no dairy and no egg, and it is suitable for a vegetarian table, but it does contain wheat and tree nuts.
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