Catalan recipes: panellets

Panellets are a small, round dessert that is prepared and consumed in Catalonia, Ibiza, Andorra and Valencia. It is a tradition to eat panellets on the holiday of All Saints, on November 1^st.  They are usually enjoyed with a sweet wine like muscatel.

Here are the ingredients you will need to make panellets:

250g of crushed raw almond

250g of sugar

Lemon zest

125g of baked potato

1 egg

70g of grated coconut

60g of pine nut

50g of raw almonds, not crushed

Now let’s learn how to prepare the panellets, step by step.

Wash the lemon and grate the skin with a grater. Mix the grated skin with sugar.

Next, place the sugar and lemon peel preparation on a bowl and mix it with the crushed raw almonds. Mix them well.

If you haven’t cooked the potato before starting this process, cook it now without removing the skin. When the potato is done, peel it and smash it with a fork.

Now let’s use the egg. Separate the egg white from the yolk, saving the egg white for later. Save a small portion of the yolk, which you can add later to the mix if it becomes too dry. For now, mix the yolk with ¾ of the cooked potato.

Now mix it with the almond/sugar/lemon mix you have previously prepared. You have to stir it the new mix for about a minute using a spatula. It may be a little hard at first because it takes a while for the mix to become homogenized, but it eventually does. The objective is to be able to create a mixture with which you can form small balls using your hands.

If the dough seems too liquid, you can add a little bit of flour or simply crush more almonds and add them to the mix. If, on the contrary, the dough feels too dry, you can add the rest of the egg yolk that you reserved from earlier.

Now that that you have created small balls using the entirety of the dough, separate half of them. Some will be almond pannellets and others will be pine nuts and almond panallets.

Dunk the balls you want to cover in pine nuts in the egg white you had reserved earlier. Place the pine nuts in a bowl and roll each ball inside the bowl until it is covered in pine nuts. After that, start setting the balls in an oven tray.

For the almond panellets the process is a little easier. Simply place one raw almond on top of each ball, pressing down slightly so that it sticks. Swab the balls with the remaining egg white. Place the balls in the oven tray next to the pine nut covered ones and place the tray in the oven set to 150^o with the grill on so that the balls become golden on top. The tray should be at medium height.

Let the panellets cook for about 10 minutes and they’re done!