Are there any Italians here?

[DanB]

Need help Identifying something I ate in a small Piemonte town recently at a town fair. Basically they had a thin batter made of hazelnut flour and something else, they added rubbed rosemary and sea salt and poured it out on a pizza pan which was then baked briefly in a wood-fired stove. The end result was somewhat crepe-like but a nice and browned on top.

I have treid googling anything and everything to try and find the name of this dish also using the Italian ingredient names. Any help would be appreciated.

[Deb Hall]

Dan,

Not italian, but ....
Italian crepes are called crespelle. Any chance it was chestnut flour, not hazelnut?:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/dining/13vege.html?ref=dining&_r=0

Deb

[DanB]

Was def Hazelnut... we got that much out of him. And we think he said no eggs i.e. crepe-like but not really a crepe as it was a bit crunchy.

[DanB]

http://www.400asafoto.com/sapori/wp-con ... rinata.jpg

Found a picture of it but my Milano friends seem to think it is a recreation of a 17th century dish made specifically for the festival (which was sort of a medaeval wine fest). Guess I can experiment with it anyway.

[DanB]

Ah never mind. Clever sleuth friend of mine figured out it is farinata which is made of chickpea flour...... not sure how we got hazelnut out of chickpea but admittedly neither of us speaks Italian.

[Ken B]

Coming to this conversation late but I was going to suggest it was farinata. The confusion may be because cecci=chickpeas and nocci=hazelnuts. By the way , panissa is the chickpea version of polenta which you may also have come across. I want to say maybe I have seen dried cecci at Lotsa
and maybe even chickpeaflowingr, it's also available at Middle eastern groceries sometimes or I
would look at Rainbow blossom or whole foods , possibly even the "organic ghetto" at Kroger or valu market.