Alessandro Giannatempo: Nonna Lucia’s Sa Pabassinus
From Nonna's Kitchen: A cross-generational collaboration, honoring heritage, + carrying culture forward a hundred thousand sprinkles at a time.
I’m heading to Florence TODAY with my family and am frantically refreshing my Italian on Duolingo and watching Love is Blind, Italy. I studied abroad molto tempo fa and can’t wait to go back. I apologize in advance to any Italians I may encounter. I will botch your language, but plan to try anyway. I’m super excited that I get to feature an incredible Italian baker today!
Alessandro Giannatempo, self-described recipe shapeshifter-making food queer again, is sharing a very special holiday dessert that celebrates his heritage and special bond with his nonna.
An Italian-born recipe developer, Alessandro now lives in London. His vibrant energy and warm smile drew me to find out more about him and his beautiful work. His Instagram is full of stunning recipes and his sparkling personality.
Alessandro knew he wanted to share a special holiday recipe, Nonna Lucia’s Sa Pabassinus, a raisin biscuit, but with her blessing to make it his own.
You’ll want to make Alessandro’s interpretation of his nonna’s recipe for the holidays. First, he’ll share his story.
After graduating from High school in Italy, where I studied architecture and history of art, I moved to London to study acting. Following a few tumultuous years, I ended up training as a pastry chef in bakeries and restaurants, where I finally found a space where I could play and interact with all the previous disciplines I’ve studied. Spending time away from home gifted me with time to start connecting the dots and building bridges between who I am and my family. I reconnected with my Italian heritage and therefore its cuisine. That’s when I knew I had to learn and explore all my family traditions and food, more deeply and tangibly. Very unconventionally, my family comes from all over the peninsula: covering Sardinia, Piedmont, Emilia Romagna, Lombardy, and Puglia. A true mix of north and south. So the research into my family’s culinary history is long and full of surprises.
The recipe I’m bringing you today is a reinterpretation of my Sardinian Nonna Lucia’s Sa Pabassinus, a raisin biscuit traditionally made during the winter celebrations. This iteration comes from giving in to the idea that recipes can morph and transform: I spoke about it with my Nonna, and she gave me her blessing to “rivisitarli a modo mio”, basically “make them my own”. So here is to embracing our heritage and its ever-changing nature to transmute into something different.
The recipe:
Alessandro and Nonna Lucia’s Sa Pabassinus:
Ingredients:
50 g. of raisins
50 g of almonds
50 g. of walnuts
250 g. of plain flour
75 g. of white sugar
1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
fine sea salt 3 g. (a big pinch)
75 g. of Lard
1 egg
zest of 1 orange and 1 lemon
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
Glaze:
1 egg white
Pinch of saffron
Pinch of caster sugar
120 g. of icing sugar
Instructions:
Start by soaking the raisins in warm water. Meanwhile, coarsely chop the almonds and walnuts.
In a bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Add the lard and rub it in until a sandy texture is achieved. Add the egg, lemon, orange zest, and vanilla extract. Continue mixing until a rough dough forms.
Drain the raisins and add them to the dough together with the chopped nuts. Knead until you obtain a smooth, homogeneous dough. Wrap it in plastic wrap and place it in the refrigerator for at least one hour.
After resting, take the dough out and roll it out with a rolling pin on a lightly floured work surface to a thickness of about 1 cm. Cut diamond shapes using a knife or a cookie cutter. Rework the scraps to make more cookies until all the dough is used.
Place the cookies on a baking tray lined with parchment paper and bake in a preheated static oven at 180°C/356°F for 15–20 minutes.
Once baked, remove the papassini (diamond-shaped cookies) from the oven and let them cool completely.
Meanwhile, prepare the icing: grind the saffron with the caster sugar until you obtain a fine powder, then transfer it to a bowl. Add the egg whites and powdered sugar and mix until well combined.
Glaze the biscuits, add the hundreds and thousands of sprinkles, and place them on a rack to let the icing dry.
If you fancy going a step further, add extra powdered sugar to the remaining glaze until it becomes thick enough to pipe, then decorate using a piping bag — have fun and go wild.