FOOD SPECIAL ................Brilliant Biscotti

FOOD SPECIAL Brilliant Biscotti  Why biscotti is best for dunking     If there was one European country that might claim to be the true domain of dunking it would not be Britain, but Italy.     The food scholar Anthony Buccini, in a paper presented at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking in 2007, lists a huge variety of ways in which dried bread products were used in Italian cooking, all essentially by dunking them. So ring-shaped rolls were cut in half and dried to make what was called freselle, which were eaten by soaking them in liquids that could be as simple as the water left over from soaking beans, with a few added seasonings. This sounds like it could be an Indian dish, down to the vada like appearance. Similar slices of dried bread could be moistened and made into a salad with tomatoes or cooked into bread soups or the savoury mush called ribollita.ll essentially by dunking them. So ring-shaped rolls were cut in half and dried to make what was called freselle, which were eaten by soaking them in liquids that could be as simple as the water left over from soaking beans, with a few added seasonings. This sounds like it could be an Indian dish, down to the vada like appearance. Similar slices of dried bread could be moistened and made into a salad with tomatoes or cooked into bread soups or the savoury mush called ribollita.     But above all, Italians have given us biscotti, which to me are really the ideal dunking ingredient. I don't want to get into arguments about this since I realize familiarity and nostalgia will always play a major role here. Australians, for example, will insist that the best dunk is with their chocolate coated and sandwiched biscuits called Tim-Tams (think of a Bourbon coated in chocolate). And to get the full effect, one end of these biscuits must be inserted in the cup and the other in your mouth so that by strong suction you ingest a mess of disintegrating biscuit and tea.     This is called the Tim-Tam Slam and I nearly choked when I first tried doing, after encountering Tim-Tams on a plane to Australia, Other passengers near me looked disgusted, but the aircrew didn't turn an eye, so presumably this happens all the time on Australian flights. It was, I have to say, about as revolting to taste as it must have looked doing it, but if you have been doing it ever since you were a kid, you are going to love it.     In fact, any reasonable person would admit that cream filled biscuits are not suited for dunking since (a) the filling and biscuits have very different textures so cannot possibly reach ideal post dunk texture at the same time, and (b) the filling is fatty and liable to contaminate the tea if you are drinking it as good tea should be drunk, without milk. Yet if you have loved cream biscuits and tea ever since you were a kid you will love doing this. Dunking is, fundamentally, not a very adult activity.     (In direct proof of this I will make a mostly illogical exception for one type of biscuit that is not filled, but covered in chocolate — those made by Nilgiri's bakeries in Bangalore and sold in their chain of supermarkets across the South. As is needed with any mass-market chocolate product in India, the chocolate is a bit harder than what you'll find with imported products like Tim-Tams, and this means that when dunked in hot tea — after biting off a bit to allow liquid access to the crisp biscuit inside — both chocolate and biscuit reach similar softness levels together, so I think there is some rational basis for using them to dunk. But it is also true that I have loved these biscuits since I was a kid).     But even allowing for all emotional exceptions, biscotti really do have a strong claim for being best suited for dunking. They are made from a rich, fruit and nut filled mixture halfway between bread and cake that is first baked, then cut in slices and dried in the oven — the second cooking, or bis-cotti of their name (also the origin of biscuit). This means they are the ideal shape for dunking, long fingers that work well in both a mug or cup (large round biscuits like Marie are the least convenient since you have to either break them in half or do a complicated dunk-bit-rotate routine).     Many Indian bakeries make a biscottilike product by thriftily slicing old, unsold cake and drying the slices in the oven. But cake-toast, as this is called in Mumbai, is awful, tasting simultaneously over-sweet, greasy and stale, and it collapses into mush very fast. Biscotti is closer to the rusktoasts made from old bread, just slightly richer tasting than those uncompromisingly plain and hard slices. This bread-like aspect makes them less fragile and the dried fruit in them works better than other inclusions, like chocolate chips, which get too soft when dunked, while dried fruits get moist enough to release their flavours better, but still stay nicely chewy.     But perhaps the real reason for my liking them is that I can get brilliant biscotti in Mumbai, even better than biscotti I have eaten in Italy. This is made by American Express, one of the oldest bakeries in Mumbai, set up in 1921 by a Goan named Joseph Carvalho and still run by his family. It has nothing to do with the credit card company and, in fact, the Carvalhos easily saw off an attempt by Amex to bully them into changing their name by pointing out they had been in existence in Mumbai from long before the company came, so if anything the card was infringing on their rights!     American Express makes many excellent breads and pastries from its spacious premises in Byculla but nothing, to my mind, to match its biscotti. It makes two kinds, a granola version which is crunchier, and a fruit and nut one, which is cakier, but both are great. Biscotti aren't hard to make and I have tried a couple of times, but it has never come out as well as those from American Express. Their biscotti is also better than the imported versions sold at much higher prices in gourmet stores. So now I just make sure I am never without a packet of Mumbai-made American Express biscotti, far better for dunking that anything the British could teach us about. Vikram Doctor CDET130906