Little Breads for Company #4: Parmesan Black Pepper Biscotti

Epicurious Recipe: Parmesan Black Pepper Biscotti

• Advanced Prep: Most biscotti can last for about two weeks in a tightly-sealed container or can be frozen.
• Method: Kind of biscuit-y

Once I discovered my oven issues, I thought, maybe it’s time to give biscotti another chance. It was sort of like discovering your friend who’d been acting erratically had some sort of...mild concussion or hormone imbalance or other legitimate physical reason for being such a very bad time.

But it does still take a while to rebuild trust, so I couldn’t jump just totally jump back in wholeheartedly. So I went with a savory biscotti.

It didn’t register, though, that this savory biscotti called for my favorite thing: cutting fat into flour until you have coarse meal. Sigh.

So if this is what I started with...

...is this coarse meal?

Well, it’s what I went with. I was reluctant to take it any further as I didn’t want the butter to melt from the room temperature and the action.

The dough it created was very sticky and difficult to form into the usual biscotti logs with my hands, even floured. Using two plastic dough separators though, I was able to successfully prod them into shape.

The rest of the baking process is the same as the usual biscotti process: bake in logs, take out...

...cool slightly, cut into the biscuits, re-bake.

So how so they taste? Um, super good. Really super duper addictively good. The large quantity of black pepper adds a spicy almost floral flavor that is a delicious contrast to the richness of the parmesan cheese. Extremely yum.

There are a couple reasons why I wind up making Epicurious recipes so often despite the legion of cookbooks that I own. One is that my bookshelf doesn’t have a handy search function. No matter how many times I yell “SAGE” at it, the books refuse to fall off the shelf and land open to recipes using sage.

The other reason is I do often find the reviews of other users are very accurate to my experience. Unfortunately, about half of the time, I only realize they are accurate after the fact.

Like in this case, I read a review beforehand saying they halved the recipe because the yield is large (5-6 dozen), but afterwards wished they’d hadn’t.

Well, I too halved the yield, and I too wished I’d hadn’t. They are now gone, and I am a little forlorn about it.

Despite the coarse meal dilemma, they are not very difficult to prepare, so I think I might be making another (full) batch, putting some into the freezer. They are also delicious cut further into cubes and tossed into a salad as a crouton.

Yesterday: Crisp Rosemary Flatbreads

Wednesday: Rosemary and Thyme Breadsticks

Tuesday: Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions, Black Pepper and Sea Salt