Italian cornetto is our typical breakfast dessert. It is a soft crescent-shaped brioche with a golden surface and a fragrant, and flaky texture. Every bar in Italy sells it in the morning together with coffee or cappuccino. It is made with a few genuine ingredients that are flour, butter, yeast, and eggs and if you keep on reading, I’ll tell you how to try to prepare it at home.
Italian cornetto recipe: what’s the story?
Italy has its excellence even for breakfast! We have a huge variety of coffee and also many sweet delicacies to eat in the morning. Cornetto is a symbol of the Italian “colazione” (breakfast). This particular type of croissant was born in 1683 in Veneto region and spread above all thanks to the art of Venetian master bakers. Many believe that the French croissant was born before of cornetto but it is not quite so. The Italian recipe for cornetto seems to derive from the Viennese kipfel. The French croissant, instead, was officially born in 1839 when the Boulangerie Viennoise opened in Paris.
Authentic Italian cornetto recipe: ingredients
First of all, you need to prepare the base dough. Due to the long preparation and leavening times, the brioche dough is considered one of the most complex pastry bases to make. These are the ingredients for 20 sweet brioches:
- 1,10 lb of Manitoba flour
- 0,03 lb of fresh brewer’s yeast
- 3 eggs + 1 yolk for brushing
- 0,39 lb of butter
- 0,17 lb fresh whole milk
- 0,17 lb of sugar
- 1 and a half tablespoons of acacia honey
- 0,03 lb of rum
- 1 tablespoon of vanilla essence
- peel of 2 grated oranges
- grated zest of 1 lemon
- 0,01 lb of salt
For the peeling, you need 0,10 lb of butter and to brush you need 1 yolk and 0,04 lb of fresh milk. To decorate use granulated sugar and acacia honey.
Italian cornetto recipe: how to make the dough at home
You better use a mixer, because the processing time is long and it is tiring to work the dough for more than 15 – 20 minutes by hand until it is swollen, greasy, smooth, elastic, and well-strung.
3 or 4 hours before you prepare the pasta brioche, put in a bowl, sealed with a film:
- oranges and lemon’s grated peel,
- rum,
- vanilla,
- honey.
Place the flour, yeast, milk, and sugar in the mixer. Use mixer at low speed and mix the ingredients for a few seconds. Then add the eggs one at a time. Wait for each egg to be completely absorbed before inserting one more. Place in the basket the mixture of aromas. Insert small pieces of butter together with salt into the dough and when they are absorbed, insert some more pieces and so on.
The cooking of Italian cornetto
Place the brioche dough in a bowl for the first rising and cover it with a film, without leaving empty spaces and let it rise in a dry and drafts-free place at a temperature of 26 ° – 28 °. After 2 hours break the leavened dough and knead it quickly on a table. Make a new ball, place it back in the bowl, cover it with the film and place it in the fridge for about 8-9 hours. After rising in the fridge, let the brioche dough rest at room temperature for at least 20 minutes.
Roll out each part in a rectangle with a base of 8 inch length the one that comes. The thickness of the sheet is 0,40 inch. Trim the ends off so they are straight. Once you made the triangles, make your empty croissants, or stuff them with jam, Nutella, cream, fruit compote.
How to roll a cornetto
How to shape your cornetto? Let’s make it clearer. You can divide into pieces with a base of 4 inch, even 8 cm if you want smaller croissants. divide each rectangle into triangles. Make a cut in the center. Lift the triangle off the work surface and stretch it almost twice as much. Roll it up tightly but without pressing too hard. If you want stuffed croissants, make them 4 inch in the center, just above the cut, add 1 teaspoon of jam, cream, or Nutella.
8 tips about where to taste the best Italian cornetto in NY
if you are planning a visit to Italy, you will be spoiled for choice among all the bars and pastry shops where you can taste an Italian-style croissant. If you live in New York, instead, you’ll better follow my suggestion to make sure you enjoy real Italian cornetto types. This is my top 8 places where to go:
- Cerasella 3627 31st Street, Long Island City
- Fornaio Bakery ad Astoria
- Roma Cafe – Soho 29-14 30th Ave in Astoria
- Tarallucci e Vino restaurant and bistrot has its homemade pastry – East Village – 163 First Avenue, Union Square – 15 East 18th St, Upper West Side – 475 Columbus, NoMad – 44 East 28th St, Cooper Hewitt – 9 East 90th St
- Pasticceria Villabate – 7001 18th street Brooklyn
- Pasta Pane 58 W 8th St.
- Angelina’s Bakery Hell’s Kitchen – 575 8th Avenue, Central Park – 1427 Avenue of America
Finally, Caffé Sant’Ambroeus is a company of Italian origins by now very well established in New York and has many shops in town:
- Brookfield Place – 200 Vesey Street
- Madison Avenue – 1000 Madison Avenue
- West Village – 259 West 4th Street
- Soho – 265 Lafayette Street
- Midtown West – 15 West 56th Street
- Southampton – 30 Main Street, Southampton
- Hanley New York – 1136 3rd Avenue
- Loews Regency Hotel – 540 Park Avenue
- Sotheby’s – 1334 York Avenue
- Gelateria – 267 Lafayette Street
Types of cornetto
“Come lo vuoi?”. If you go inside a bar in Italy and you ask for a cornetto, this will be the first question they’ll make you. How do you want it? That’s because there are many types of cornetto and, the most good and creative the pastry is, the more cornetto types you’ll find. The first distinction we have to make is that between wholemeal cornetto, vegan cornetto, and classic cornetto. All three are called “empty” or simple because they have no filling and the difference is in the preparation of the dough. The main variants of the filling instead are chocolate, custard, cherry jam, and apricot jam. The most specialized pastry shops also sell croissants filled with white chocolate, pistachio cream, blueberries, and many others.
