Grissini: Italian breadsticks stretched by hand, brittle enough to snap
Thin, knobbly sticks of olive oil yeast dough, stretched between the hands rather than rolled and baked until they crack when broken. The oil in the dough makes them short and baking them dry makes them snap instead of bending; stretching leaves the air a rolling pin would have crushed out. Twenty-four of them, for wine, for soup and for a board of cold cuts.
Your own work in that: 30 min.
- Kneading 10 min
- Rising 60 min
- Cutting and stretching 20 min
- Baking (2 trays) 36 min
Step by step
0 / 7 doneKnead the olive oil dough
Dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm water with the sugar. Pour into the flour and salt, add the oil and knead 8–10 minutes, until smooth, firm and elastic. It is noticeably stiffer than roll dough: 240 ml water to 400 g flour is 60 % hydration, which is what lets the strips stretch without collapsing.
Ingredients: 400 g strong bread flour · 240 ml water · 8 g fresh yeast · 40 ml olive oil · 8 g salt · 1 tsp sugar
TipThe forty millilitres of oil are about texture as much as flavour: fat coats the gluten strands and shortens them, so baked grissini are brittle rather than hard and leathery like a stale roll.
Firm, smooth, elastic after ten minutesFirst rise
Shape the dough into a ball, put it in an oiled bowl, cover and leave somewhere warm for 60 minutes, until doubled.
An hour in the warm, doubledPress into a rectangle and top it
Heat the oven to 200 °C. Move the dough onto a lined tray and press it out with your fingers into a 24 × 30 cm rectangle 1 cm thick; do not roll it. Brush with oil and scatter with the sesame, herbs and coarse salt, then press lightly with your palm so the topping sticks.
Ingredients: 2 tbsp olive oil · 3 tbsp sesame seeds · 1 tbsp dried rosemary or oregano · 1 tsp coarse salt
A 24 × 30 cm rectangle, oil and toppingCut into strips
With a pizza wheel or a sharp knife cut the rectangle along its long side into strips 1 cm wide: 24 strips, each 30 cm long. Don't separate them yet, leave them lying as they are.
Centimetre strips, cut with a wheelStretch each strip by hand
Take a strip by both ends and stretch it in the air, passing it between your hands, until it reaches the length of the tray (35–40 cm). Lay them 2 cm apart on a second lined tray and, once the first one is free, on that too; each holds 12. They should be uneven and twisted: that is what grissini look like, not shop breadsticks.
TipStretching pulls the dough apart without squeezing out the bubbles the yeast made. A rolling pin does the opposite: it crushes them, and you get a hard, dense stick instead of a brittle one with an open interior.
By both ends, in the air, the length of the trayBake until dry through
Bake 15–18 minutes at 200 °C, until pale gold and rigid. Grissini must dry all the way through, not merely colour: take one out at 15 minutes, cool it for a minute and snap it. If it bends in the middle, give them 3 minutes more. Bake one tray at a time, about 35 minutes in all.
TipColour is a poor guide for bread this thin. Thin dough browns faster than it gives up its water, so the only reliable test is snapping a cooled stick: it should crack, not yield.
Pale gold, rigid, a cooled stick snapsCool and store
Cool on a rack 10 minutes: the brittleness only arrives once they are cold. In an airtight jar or tin they keep 2 weeks. Refresh softened ones for 4 minutes at 180 °C and cool them again.
Into the jar, two weeks of crunch
Before you start
With prosciutto
Wrap a thin slice of cured ham around the middle of each cooled stick. The classic Italian starter: five minutes of work and it looks like a restaurant plate.
With cheese
4 tbsp finely grated parmesan instead of the sesame. Cheese scorches sooner, so cut the bake by 2 minutes and watch the colour.
The sticks are soft and rubbery
Strips cut too thick, too short a bake, or too wet a dough. Cut to a strict centimetre, stretch to the full length of the tray, and always test by snapping a cooled stick.
