I made the castagnaccio!!! 🙆‍♀️

It should have turned out true to tradition, but I need your feedback! 😀 Being the first time I’ve eaten a castagnaccio in my life, and also the first time I’ve made it with my own hands.

But oh, at the first bite, all four of us simultaneously said “yummy!”, with an exclamation point, so… I would say it’s a good starting point, wouldn’t you? 😄

I imagine, however, that a purist of the original recipe might point out a couple of details. For example, making it in single servings. I didn’t see any single-serving castagnaccio during my brief tour of the web, but… here with us, for instance, I’ve often seen single-serving piade dei morti for sale, so… come on, I think it can be done with castagnaccio too.

And then, secondly, maybe it turned out a bit too thin. I imagine it, because in the photo that appears in the book from which I got the recipe, the sliced piece is taller. Mine was a technical choice; I needed the baking time to be shorter than the 50 minutes read on the chestnut flour package, and also shorter than the 40 minutes in the book’s recipe.

Which is actually not a real book; it’s a booklet, a cross between a small book and a mini cooking magazine, which often comes to my rescue when I’m in search of ideas. It is titled Vegetarian Haute Cuisine, recipes for happy vegetarians (Del Baldo editions). A title so beautiful that it couldn’t not be part of my little culinary library. 😃

This time I was looking for an idea for this week’s Light and Tasty recipe, which focuses on “alternative flours”. While browsing this booklet looking for an idea to use whole grain rice flour (yes, yes, rice flour, that’s where I started), I caught sight of the title Castagnaccio and… ta-da! The light bulb went on. Damn it! I do have a bag of chestnut flour at home! Where did I hide it???

Moreover, for us seaside people, chestnut flour is much more alternative than rice flour, so the right recipe for me today couldn’t be anything but this!

In the end, I didn’t follow the book’s recipe to the letter (did we have any doubts?) but I made a mix between that and the recipe written on the chestnut flour package. And the result surprised me because I really didn’t think it would be liked by the whole crew (even without exceptions! 😃).

I was so sure that I used a minimal amount of ingredients, obtaining the three single servings you see in the photos. And in my imagination, they would all be left to me! Making a big mistake! 😄

Well, next time I’ll have to review the weights; I think it will be better to quadruple them!

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Autumn recipes: