Cartellate Recipe Apulian Fritters
If you love Italian fried treats, like the famous Chiacchiere, you are going to love this Apulian variation. While these are especially popular around the Christmas holidays, you can also make them for Carnival, to keep in with the Italian tradition of eating fried foods around Carnival.
And there’s more..
The same dough recipe allows you to make two different Apulian shaped fritters – cartellate and purcidduzzi. Don’t worry, we will show you both ways.
And the best part is that you can serve each type in so many ways – with honey, cooked wine (vincotto), powdered sugar, cacao powder, flaked almonds, and more.
So if you’re ready to start making them, let’s begin.
Apulian Cartellate Recipe
Ingredients:
- 600 gr 0 flour or Manitoba (you can also use 00 flour)
- 300 ml dry white wine
- 200 ml Belmorso Extra Virgin Olive Oil
- 15 gr salt
- your favorite oil for deep frying
How To Make Cartellate:
- Mix all the ingredients into a large bowl, starting with the flour and salt, and then proceeding to add the wine and extra virgin olive oil.
- Once you have worked your dough with a spoon, a dough cutter, or your hands, you can start making the cartellate immediately.
- If you want to try both cartellate and purcidduzzi, we suggest you divide your dough into two equal parts. Set one aside, covered so it doesn’t dry.
- To make the cartellate you’ll need either a pasta machine to thin the dough, or you can thin it using a rolling pin. You want to create strips of dough long about 30 cm and 3 cm wide.
- To cut the dough, you can use a dented pastry cutter, so as to make the borders look prettier.
- Once you have all your strips cut into 30 cm x 3cm, you want to take one of the ends and start creating sort of boats. Then press with your fingers, and create another boat sort of shape. So your dough will have a series of small boats, with a small space between each one, the size of you finger print. Each boat will be about 2 cm long. See the pictures for reference.
- Once you finish creating the boats and pressing in between till the end of your strip, you can proceed to the next step. This simply involves twisting your strip like a snail. As you twist them, you want to keep them together by pinching the dough from both meeting sides of your strip. Again, please see the pictures for reference.
- Repeat the process for all your strips of dough. Remember, to keep the second half of the dough for the purcidduzzi, if you’d like to also make those on the same day.
- The next step will be frying them. Fill your pot with plenty of oil and heat it well. It should reach at least 160 °C, in case you want to use a thermometer.
- Once it does, you can add your cartellate. You want to make sure to leave space between each one as they fry. Once they start taking a golden color, flip them using a kitchen tweezer and let them golden on the other side.
- Next, take them out of the oil and put them on a wire rack to drip and cool.
- Continue frying the rest.
Hot To Make Purcidduzzi:
- Take the second half of the dough, divide it into various parts, and with each you want to create a cylinder, and roll it fairly thin. The thickness should be the size of a small gnocchi style pasta. That’s the shape we are going to create.
- Once you have your cylinder of dough, you want to use a knife or a dough cutter, to cut those gnocchi shaped pieces of dough.
- Repeat that until you’ve used all your dough.
- You can fry the purcidduzzi in the same oil you used for your cartellate, following the same steps.
How To Serve Cartellate and Purcidduzzi:
When your cartellate are ready and have dripped any excess oil, you can top them with one of the following:
- warm honey, which you can simply heat in a pan and drizzle.
- warm cooked wine, or fig syrup. In Italian, we call these vincotto and fig vincotto.
- powdered sugar.
Once they are ready, make sure to taste one or two. You are going to love them!
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