Holiday Skoal! Special Bonus: Holiday Pictures and Dave's Favorite Christmas Cookie

posted by Nastassia Lopez and Dave Arnold

(Hey, what is this Skål Project anyway?)

To celebrate the season of good cheer and good eats, we’ve compiled some of our favorite food-folk skoals.

First up, a gang of New York City’s top chefs:

And people who like to eat their food and write about it:

Too Many Cookies: Making and Shipping FCI’s Holiday Cookies, After Which We Needed A Skoal

Last week we baked 3,678 chocolate chip cookies. The pastry chefs, student volunteers and tech crew baked and packed them in 6 hours flat. We spent the rest of the week trying to ship them to Iraq.  We’re good at cooking but bad at shipping:

For the Holidays: Dave’s Favorite Christmas Cookie

Ricciarelli are traditional almond cookies from Siena. These aren’t stricly traditional, we add lemon to the traditional orange, use fresh zest instead of candied peel, and add more vanilla. We also use more egg whites than normal, which makes for a chewier cookie. The key to the flavor of riciarelli is bitter almond. Here in the US we usually get this flavor by using almond extract. You can get the real thing, however, in stores in Chinatown. The package will be labeled “bitter almond,” or “apricot kernel,” or “northern apricot.”  They contain amygdalin, which decomposes to cyanide, so don’t eat a lot of them. The interns were popping them like candy. We said, “hey, that’s poison.” They laughed and kept eating. Guess we joke about that stuff too much.

We used the Santha grinder to make the dough, but you could get almost the same result in a robot coupe. or by using almond paste. Here is the recipe:

1800 grams blanched almonds
1300 grams granulated sugar
32 grams bitter almonds
15 grams salt
25 grams lemon zest
45 grams orange zest
4 scraped vanilla beans
90 grams ap flour
90 grams confectioner’s sugar
7 egg whites
100 grams granulated sugar