Biscotti con Cioccolato for the large pantry
The large bag of Biscotti con Cioccolato contains the same dark cookie as the small size, but it lasts twice as long. Coarse cocoa-based pieces, sea salt from Cervia, and essential orange oil, baked by Fratelli Lunardi in Tuscany.
Biscotti con Cioccolato in the 400-gram bag are the pantry-sized version of that dark cookie which Fratelli Lunardi has been baking in Quarrata for over 25 years using the same recipe. Twice as much content as the standard format, same dough, same coarse pieces. Anyone who has started eating them will quickly understand why this size exists at all.
Four hundred grams for a full house
The small bag is the size for the kitchen cupboard; this one is the size for guests. It carries you through a weekend, a week in Advent, or a long coffee table gathering.
Calculated per 100 grams, the large format is also the more economical choice. Those who know the cookie and know they will reorder anyway save themselves the intermediate step. And if you are not yet familiar with them, it is better to first pick up the small 200-gram bag and see how quickly it empties.
The bag itself is made of paper with a window, through which you can see the edges of the cookies before opening it. The family-run bakery consciously packages its cookies this way, while offering gift boxes, which are available in 120-gram and 250-gram sizes, in cardboard. Kept closed and stored in a dry place, the crumb remains crisp for weeks.
Dark dough, coarse pieces, a touch of salt
The dough is almost black, soft and fine-pored, and holds pieces that you don't just taste, but discover.
They yield instead of splintering and remain in your mouth even after the cookie has long since crumbled. Working in between are two small ingredients that you only notice with the second cookie. Natural sea salt from Cervia keeps the sweetness in check, and essential oil from Italian oranges casts a bright arc over the cocoa.
The dough also contains at least 6 percent dark chocolate. What remains is an interplay of three directions—buttery, salty, fruity—and none of them pushes to the front. You can taste the most of it at room temperature; cold from the cupboard, the cocoa remains subdued.
A bakery in Quarrata, plus two shops
They are baked in Quarrata, a small town in the province of Pistoia. It started there in 1966 as a village bakery with an attached shop.
The one shop has become two: one in Quarrata and one out on the state road near Pistoia. There, alongside the cookies, you will find everything else the house produces, from bread to wine from their own selection. So, if you are traveling in Tuscany, you can simply step inside where this bag comes from.
Massimiliano and Riccardo Lunardi, the sons of the house, run it today and have turned the bread business into a cookie bakery without giving up the bread. Besides the biscotti, schiacciata, savory pastries, and at Christmas, panettone, come out of the same oven. For the panettone, the bakery works with a sourdough starter that has been fed in the family for over 80 years.
This is only possible with small, slow machines and hands that know the dough, is how Massimiliano and Riccardo describe their working method. Their panettone has reached the finals of the Panettone World Championship several times, and their cookies are found today at Harrods in London and Käfer in Munich.
All of the brothers' varieties can be found at Fratelli Lunardi, related classics in Sweet Pastries, and the rest of the south in the Italian Assortment. Four hundred grams sounds like a lot. It is not.