Italian Calabrian Honey, Walnut and Spice Pastry | Pitta 'mpigliata Calabrese
Updated: Sep 15
Pitta 'mpigliata is the Christmas pastry of San Giovanni in Fiore, a town high in the Sila plateau in the province of Cosenza. Thin sheets of wine and oil dough are spread with walnuts, raisins, honey and spice, rolled into tight little roses, and stood upright in a round pan so that they open outward from the centre like a rosette window. It bakes into something between a pastry and a confection, and it keeps for a fortnight.
The name says what it is. Pitta is the southern Italian word for a flat baked bread, and 'mpigliata comes from the dialect verb for entangling or wrapping, with the leading vowel dropped as Calabrian does. The apostrophe is not decoration, it marks a swallowed syllable. What is entangled is the dough around the filling, and the roses around each other.
Yield: one 10 inch (25 cm) pan, 10 servings. Prep: 1 hour. Rest: 30 minutes. Bake: 50 minutes. Total: about 2 hours 40 minutes plus cooling. Difficulty: intermediate. Course: festive pastry. Region: Calabria, Sila plateau, San Giovanni in Fiore.
The Story
San Giovanni in Fiore grew around the abbey founded by the abbot Gioacchino da Fiore at the end of the twelfth century, and the town has carried Pitta 'mpigliata as its own for as long as anyone there can account for. It belongs to Christmas above all, baked in quantity in the days before the holiday and kept in tins to be offered to anyone who calls, but it also appears at weddings, where it was traditionally given to guests, and at baptisms.
The ingredients are a portrait of the Sila in winter. Walnuts and chestnuts grow across the plateau, raisins and dried figs came up from the Ionian coast, and honey came from the same hills. Nothing in the recipe is perishable, which is the whole point: it was built to be made ahead and to survive a fortnight of visitors in an unheated house.
Ingredients
For the dough
All purpose flour, 3 1/2 cups (440 g)
Dry white wine, 1/2 cup (120 ml), at room temperature
Extra virgin olive oil, 1/2 cup (120 ml)
Granulated sugar, 1/4 cup (50 g)
Large egg, 1
Baking powder, 1 tsp (4 g)
Fine sea salt, 1/2 tsp (3 g)
Finely grated orange zest, from 1 orange
For the filling
Walnut halves, 2 cups (240 g), toasted and chopped
Raisins, 1 cup (150 g)
Honey, 1/2 cup (170 g), chestnut or wildflower
Cooked wine, vino cotto, 3 tbsp (45 ml), or reduced red wine
Granulated sugar, 1/3 cup (67 g)
Ground cinnamon, 1 tsp (2.5 g)
Ground cloves, 1/4 tsp (0.5 g)
Finely grated orange zest, from 1 orange
Finely grated lemon zest, from 1 lemon
Extra virgin olive oil, 2 tbsp (30 ml)
Sweet liqueur or brandy, 2 tbsp (30 ml), optional
For finishing
Honey, 1/3 cup (115 g)
Warm water, 2 tbsp (30 ml)
Walnut pieces, 2 tbsp, for scattering
Olive oil for the pan, about 1 tbsp (15 ml)
Oven temperature, 350°F (175°C)
Preparation
Step 1
Plump the raisins and toast the walnuts. Cover the raisins with warm water and leave them 15 minutes, then drain them and spread them on a clean towel to dry thoroughly. If you are using the liqueur, toss the drained raisins in it now and leave them while you work. Meanwhile spread the walnut halves on a tray and toast them at 350°F (175°C) for 8 minutes, until fragrant but not dark, then cool them and chop them to roughly the size of a pea.
Step 2
Mix the filling and let it stand. Combine the chopped walnuts, the dried raisins, the sugar, cinnamon, cloves, orange zest and lemon zest in a bowl and toss them until the spices are evenly through the nuts. Add the honey, the cooked wine and the olive oil and stir until every piece is coated. The mixture should hold together when squeezed in a fist and hold its shape, but no liquid should pool at the bottom of the bowl. Leave it 20 minutes so the fruit absorbs the honey.
Step 3
Make the wine and oil dough. Whisk the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and orange zest together in a wide bowl and make a well in the centre. Add the egg, the white wine and the olive oil to the well and stir with a fork, drawing flour in from the walls a little at a time, until the mixture is too stiff for the fork.
Step 4
Knead and rest. Turn the dough onto the bench and knead it for about 8 minutes, until it is smooth, elastic and just slightly firm, resisting the urge to add flour beyond a light dusting. Wine and oil doughs feel tacky at first and come together as the gluten develops. Wrap the ball and rest it at room temperature for 30 minutes. This relaxation is what allows the sheet to be rolled paper thin later without springing back or tearing.
Step 5
Roll the sheets very thin. Divide the rested dough into four pieces and keep three covered. Roll the first into a long rectangle about 4 inches (10 cm) wide and as thin as you can manage, ideally 1/16 inch (1.5 mm), thin enough that the bench shows faintly through it. Trim the long edges straight with a knife or a fluted wheel.
Step 6
Fill and roll the roses. Spoon a narrow line of filling along the strip, about 1/2 inch (1 cm) from one long edge and no more than 3/4 inch (2 cm) wide, leaving the rest bare. Fold the near edge over the filling and press the seam gently to close it, then roll the filled strip along its length into a spiral, loosely, so the layers are touching but not compressed. Cut the strip into lengths that give roses of about 2 inches (5 cm) across.
Step 7
Arrange the pan as a rosette. Oil a 10 inch (25 cm) round pan lightly. Stand the roses upright with the spiral facing up, one in the centre and the rest in rings around it, working outward and leaving a small gap between each so the pastry can expand and bake through.
Step 8
Bake, glaze and cool. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 45 to 50 minutes, until deeply golden with the walnuts toasted at the surface and the honey lightly caramelised around the edges. If the top darkens before 35 minutes, lay a sheet of foil loosely over it. While it bakes, warm the finishing honey with the water until it is fluid but never boiling. Brush the hot pastry with the warm honey as soon as it leaves the oven, scatter the walnut pieces over it, and cool it completely in the pan before cutting.
Plating
Serve it as a whole rosette first, brought to the table in the pan or slid onto a flat board, so people see the arrangement before it is broken.
For a plated dessert, lift out two or three roses and stand them slightly apart on a plain ceramic plate so the spiral of pastry, walnut and raisin faces the diner. Add a small drizzle of the warm honey glaze beside them and three or four toasted walnut halves. Nothing green, no powdered sugar, no berries. The pastry is dark gold and glossy and the contrast it wants is an empty plate.
Professional Technique
The dough here is a pasta matta enriched with wine, and the wine is doing real work rather than adding flavour. Alcohol competes with water for the flour proteins and evaporates in the oven, which limits gluten development and leaves microscopic channels behind as it goes, so the baked sheet is flaky and shatters rather than chewing. It also lowers the surface tension of the dough, which is why a wine dough rolls thinner and with less resistance than a water dough of the same hydration.
Olive oil in place of butter is the second structural decision. A liquid fat coats flour proteins completely and evenly at room temperature, where solid butter sits in discrete pieces, so the dough is supple and extensible instead of short and crumbly. That extensibility is what allows a 1/16 inch (1.5 mm) sheet to be rolled up around a filling without splitting at the curve. The trade is that there is no lamination and no rise: the sheet bakes into thin crisp layers held apart only by the filling between them.
Texture and Moisture Control
The finished pastry should offer four things at once: a crisp caramelised outer edge, a thin tender pastry layer through the spiral, crunch from the walnuts and yield from the raisins. The single greatest threat to all of it is water in the filling. Raisins that were plumped and not dried properly release their soak into the dough during baking and the inner turns go soggy and grey, and no amount of extra oven time recovers them. Drain them hard and pat them dry on a towel.
Honey placement matters as much as honey quantity. The honey inside the filling is there to bind and to caramelise slowly against the nuts; the honey on top is applied only after baking because sugar brushed on beforehand burns long before the pastry is cooked through. Brushing while the pastry is still hot lets the glaze thin out and set into a lacquer, whereas honey on a cold surface sits as a sticky pool that never absorbs and makes the top unpleasant to handle.
Professional Mise en Place
Equipment and tools
Round baking pan 10 inches (25 cm) with a removable base if possible
Rolling pin or a pasta roller for consistently thin sheets
Fluted pastry wheel for trimming the strips and a sharp knife for cutting the roses
Pastry brush for the honey glaze and a small saucepan for warming it
Clean towel for drying the raisins and a tray for toasting the walnuts
Prepared ahead
Walnuts toasted and chopped, up to 3 days ahead, stored airtight
Filling mixed, up to 2 days ahead, refrigerated and brought back to room temperature
Dough made and rested, up to 1 day ahead, wrapped and refrigerated, then warmed 30 minutes
Raisins plumped, drained and dried on the day of baking
Pan oiled and the oven confirmed at 350°F (175°C)
Service setup
Honey and water measured into the small pan ready to warm during the bake
Foil cut to size in case the top colours early
Walnut pieces for scattering set aside separately from the filling
Cooling space cleared for a full 2 hours before any cutting
Chef Tips
Use a strong honey. Chestnut honey from the Sila is the local choice and its slight bitterness is what keeps a pastry this sweet from cloying; wildflower or a dark forest honey does the same job. A pale acacia honey is pleasant but contributes almost nothing against the spices and the caramelised walnuts, and the result tastes flatly sugary.
If you cannot find vino cotto, reduce 1 cup (240 ml) of a dark red wine with 1 tbsp (21 g) of honey down to 3 tbsp (45 ml) over low heat. It takes about 20 minutes and it is worth the trouble, because that cooked wine note is the flavour that separates a real Pitta 'mpigliata from a generic honey and nut pastry. Make it a week ahead, it keeps indefinitely in a jar.
Bake it the day before you intend to serve it. This pastry improves measurably overnight as the honey settles into the dough and the cinnamon and cloves round out, and it is genuinely at its peak on day two. Glaze it when it comes out of the oven, cool it fully, then cover the pan loosely and leave it at room temperature.
Common Mistakes
Rolling the dough too thick. Anything above 1/16 inch (1.5 mm) bakes bready rather than crisp and the spiral reads as a lump of dough with filling in it. The sheet should be thin enough to see the bench through faintly. If your pin cannot get there, use a pasta roller on the second or third setting.
Overfilling the strips. A filling line wider than 3/4 inch (2 cm) forces the seam open in the oven and the honey runs out and burns on the pan. Use less than looks right, spread it in a narrow band, and keep the leftover filling for tucking between the roses.
Using raisins that are still wet. Water released during baking soaks the inner turns and makes them grey and soft. After the 15 minute soak, drain them hard and spread them on a towel until the surface is genuinely dry to the touch, not merely less wet.
Glazing before baking. Honey brushed on raw dough burns black long before the pastry is cooked, and the bitterness carries through the whole pan. The glaze goes on in the first minute after the pan comes out of the oven, while the surface is hot enough to thin it.
Cutting it warm. The filling is molten at that point and the spirals have no structure, so the slices collapse and smear. Cool it completely in the pan for at least 2 hours, and ideally leave it overnight before it is cut or pulled apart.
Wine Pairing
Greco di Bianco DOC: The Calabrian answer and the historically correct one, a passito from the Ionian coast made from grapes dried in the sun. Its candied orange peel, dried fig and bergamot aromatics sit directly on top of the citrus zest and raisins in the filling, and the honeyed sweetness matches the glaze without exceeding it. A small glass at around 55°F (13°C).
Moscato di Scanzo DOCG: A rare sweet red from Lombardia, dried on racks and aged, and an unexpectedly precise match. Its rose, dried cherry and cinnamon character runs straight into the spice of the filling, and its light tannin gives the pairing grip against the fat of the walnuts. Sweet reds are rarely the right answer with pastry but the clove note here makes it one.
Vin Santo del Chianti Classico DOC: The oxidative walnut and dried apricot profile of a good Vin Santo mirrors the toasted nuts in the filling rather than contrasting with them, which is exactly what this pastry wants. Its acidity stays high under considerable residual sugar, so the palate is scrubbed clean between bites of honey. Pour it in small measures, it is powerful.
Recioto della Valpolicella DOCG: Sweet, dark and made from dried Corvina, it brings black cherry and a faint bitter almond finish that lands well against chestnut honey and cloves. The tannin is soft enough not to clash with the raisins, and the wine has enough weight to stand up to a pastry this rich. Serve it slightly cool, near 60°F (16°C).
Storage & Reheating
Kept whole and covered at cool room temperature, Pitta 'mpigliata lasts 10 to 14 days and improves for the first three. Use a tin or cover the pan loosely with foil rather than sealing it in plastic, which traps moisture and softens the crisp edges. This keeping quality is not incidental, it is the reason the pastry exists in the form it does: it was baked to last through the Christmas visiting season.
It freezes well for up to 2 months, either whole or as individual roses, wrapped tightly in parchment and then foil. Thaw at room temperature for 3 hours, still wrapped, then unwrap. To restore the crispness of a pastry that has gone soft, give it 8 minutes in a 300°F (150°C) oven and brush it with a little warm honey thinned with water as it comes out. Serve at room temperature, never straight from the oven.
Nutrition
Per serving, based on 10 servings from one 10 inch (25 cm) pan:
Calories: 545 kcal
Total Fat: 27 g
Saturated Fat: 3 g
Trans Fat: 0 g
Unsaturated Fat: 23 g
Cholesterol: 19 mg
Sodium: 165 mg
Total Carbohydrates: 70 g
Fiber: 3 g
Total Sugars: 38 g
Added Sugars: 30 g
Protein: 8 g
Lactose: 0 g
Principal micronutrients: omega 3 fatty acids, vitamin E, copper, manganese, magnesium, potassium
These figures are estimates. The pastry contains no dairy at all, so the lactose figure is zero, and the sugar total shifts with how heavily the finishing honey is brushed on.
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