Chestnut flour from Garfagnana (DOP)

The use of chestnut flour (often locally referred to as ‘farina di neccio’) in cooking goes back centuries and has its origins in the town of Garfagnana. In this mountainous area it has always been used just like normal flour made from grain is used in the plains lower down. The chestnut tree is therefore locally known as the ‘bread tree’ and its fruits, the chestnuts, as ‘tree bread’. It was traditionally most frequently consumed in the same way as polenta, although that’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of other ways of cooking it.

To make the famous ‘necci’, it’s necessary to combine the chestnut flour with water and cook it on an open fire between two metal plates. This bread is eaten with ricotta and salamis. To make the famous ‘castagnaccio’ cake, chestnut flour is mixed with water, walnuts, orange peel and oil and baked.

Today, chestnut flour isn’t such a major part of people’s diets and it certainly isn’t used to ward off hunger as it once was. Nonetheless, it’s possible to appreciate its delicate flavour when enjoying some necci bread or a piece of castagnaccio cake, perhaps with added rosemary and pine nuts.

Chestnut flour can also be mixed with water to make tasty fritters (often sprinkled with icing sugar). The traditional method for harvesting and storing chestnuts was to keep them, once harvested in a small rural outhouse called a ‘metato’ where the chestnuts could be dried by the heat from a chestnut wood fire. After around forty days in this store room the chestnuts start to take on the flavour so typical of the famous flour traditionally made from them in Garfagnana.

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