Pestiños or Easter fried cakes
I still remember the first time that I made pestiños. I had eaten them at my friends’ and I loved them. So, one afternoon when my grandma and her sister, my great aunt Ana Maria, had come to cook Easter cakes with us, I asked them if they knew how to make pestiños. It took my auntie not time to cook a batch in the hot olive oil that where we had been frying other Easter delicacies, and I have never forgotten her recipe: “a cup of olive oil, a cup of white wine, “matalauva” and all the flour that the dough admits”.
That is the way that recipes were passed down through generations!
Ingredients
For the pastry:
70ml of dry white wine
250 g plain flour approximately
1 teaspoon of “matalauva” (aniseed or fennel seeds)
For the cinnamon sugar coating:
100g of caster sugar
1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
For the honey coating:
70g local honey
15ml water
250 ml Negra Harvest olive oil to fry the pestiños
Takes 30 mins plus resting time – serves 6
Method
Heat the Negra Harvest olive oil a pan with a piece of orange peel. Once the orange peel has browned and the oil is hot, turn off the heat, remove the orange peel and add the anise seeds. Let the olive oil cool to room temperature. Once the olive oil is cool, add the wine and mix it well.
Put the flour in a large bowl, make a well in the centre and and mix it with the cooled olive oil and wine. Knead, mixing well until you have a thin dough that pulls away from the sides of the bowl, you may need to add more flour. Then, let the dough rest for half an hour, covered with a cloth.
Roll the dough out with a rolling pin until it’s about the thickness of a coin. Then cut it into strips about 2 inches wide, and then, accross, into squares. To make the traditional pestiño shape, fold two opposite corners and stick one on top of the other with a drop of water.
Heat a pan with plenty of Negra Harvest olive oil, to a medium high temperature, and fry the pestiños in batches, turning them over so they brown evenly. When they’re cooked through, drain the pestiños on paper towels.
Allow the olive oil from frying to cool down completely, then sieve it, and keep it for cooking, or to make an olive oil cake.
Now, in my family, we coat pestiños with cinnamon sugar. But in other families, the tradition is to briefly dip them in a mixture of honey and a water, which has been gently heated over the stove.
You can try both, and let us know which one you prefer!
This is a fun recipe to prepare with children, they can stick the corners together, and they can be in charge of coating them in sugar and cinnamon. That was our role when we were children.
