No. 3278

Grissinis with Butter

Grissinis au Beurre

Make a hollow in the center of a pound of flour sifted on the table and in it lay half an ounce of yeast; dilute with a gill of warm water, working in slowly a little flour in order to have a soft paste; cover this with the remainder of the flour, and let rise to double the original height, then add a pinch of salt and a gill of barely tepid water; mix thoroughly to obtain a rather consistent dough, and finally add two ounces of butter; cover this over with a cloth, and leave it to rise for twenty-five minutes, then set it on a floured table and break it up into small half-ounce bits; mold these into balls, and leave them to rise for ten minutes before rolling them into strings a quarter of an inch in diameter; place them at once on lightly buttered baking tins, and leave to rise once more for ten to twelve minutes. As soon as they are ready push into a slow oven to bake to a fine golden color.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A straightforward sponge-and-dough breadstick, written in Ranhofer's clipped professional shorthand. The main translation work is in the units and the yeast.

GillA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz, about 120 ml). The recipe uses two of them, so roughly 1 cup of water in total to a pound of flour — a firm dough by design, which is what lets the strings hold their shape.
A pound of flourAbout 3 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour by volume, though weighing it at 450 g is more reliable. A strong white or bread flour gives the snappier grissini texture.
Half an ounce of yeastThis means compressed fresh yeast, about 14 g. Substitute roughly 2 teaspoons active dry or 1 1/2 teaspoons instant. Instant yeast does not need the initial dilution in water, but the sponge step is still worth keeping for flavor.
The spongeBurying the wet starter under the dry flour is a sponge method of the kind later associated with Italian preferments. Leave it until it has visibly doubled and domed through the flour cap; the recipe gives no time, so judge it by eye — longer in a cool kitchen. Much of the flavor comes from this step.
Slow oven300 to 325F is the usual modern reading. Grissini are as much dried as baked; a hot oven colors them before the interior has dried out and they go leathery rather than brittle. Ranhofer gives no time, so bake to a fine golden color.
Half-ounce piecesAbout 14 g each. The dough comes to roughly 26 ounces in all, so a pound of flour yields somewhere near 50 sticks. Rolled to a quarter inch, each piece stretches to a foot or more.
The two short restsTen minutes after balling and ten to twelve after rolling — no more. Over-proofed strings slacken, spread on the tin and lose the thin even section that defines a grissino.
KeepingCool completely on a rack before storing. Fully dried grissini keep several weeks in a tin; any that stay soft in the center will go stale within a day.

A Little History

Grissini are generally traced to Piedmont, and to Turin in particular, where the long thin dried breadstick has been a regional specialty since at least the eighteenth century; the name comes from the Piedmontese ghersa, a form of loaf, with the diminutive giving the sense of a small, slender one. Their appearance in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) reflects the kitchen he ran at Delmonico's in New York, where the repertoire was French in method but freely stocked with Italian, German and Viennese baking.