Castagnettes — Chestnut-Flour Shortbread Rounds

Ingredients

• 225 g Farine de Châtaigne Corse IGP, sifted
• 25 g Triticum aestivum plain flour, sifted; 10% of total flour weight
• 125 g unsalted butter (Bos taurus), cold, cut into small cubes
• 60 g caster sugar
• 1 pinch fine sea salt
• Optional glaze
• 1 tsp per round Miel de Corse AOP, a small amount pressed onto each surface before baking

Method

1. 1
   Heat the oven to 160 °C. Line a flat baking tray with parchment. Sift the chestnut flour and plain flour together into a wide bowl; add the caster sugar and the pinch of sea salt. Mix briefly to combine. The mixture should smell of concentrated chestnut and smell clean, with no mustiness from the IGP flour.
2. 2
   Add the cold butter cubes to the flour mixture. Work rapidly with fingertips — pressing and releasing, never rubbing warm palms through the mass — until the mixture resembles coarse, even breadcrumbs with no visible butter lumps remaining. This is where the dish lives or dies: butter that has warmed produces a greasy mass that will not crumble correctly, and the resulting rounds will be dense and tough rather than sandy; the mixture must feel cool and dry to the touch and hold its shape only when pressed firmly.
3. 3
   Take approximately 15 g of the crumble mixture per round. Press firmly between the palms first, then set on the tray and press with two fingers to a disc of 3 cm diameter and 1 cm thickness. Do not roll. Repeat for all rounds, spacing them 2 cm apart. Edges should be clean and defined; if they fracture on pressing, the butter was insufficiently cold. If using the honey glaze, press a small amount of Miel de Corse AOP onto each surface now.
4. 4
   Bake at 160 °C for 18 minutes. At the correct moment, the rounds will show an even pale mahogany colour across the full surface with clean pressed edges and no darkening at the rim. Dark brown edges with a pale centre indicate the oven is too hot.
5. 5
   Remove the tray from the oven and leave the rounds undisturbed on the tray until completely cold. They are fragile when warm and will break if lifted before the butter has re-set fully. When cold, the base of each round should feel firm and the surface should yield a clean, sandy break under light finger pressure — rubbery or dense resistance indicates warm butter was used or the wheat-flour proportion was exceeded.
6. 6
   Lift from the tray and transfer to an airtight tin. The finished round delivers concentrated chestnut-sweetness, butter richness, and slight salt on tasting. A flat, floury result indicates too low a proportion of chestnut flour or flour below IGP standard.