Joy of Chocolate Biscotti

Author Notes

Ahh, the best thing I know to do with coffee is biscotti – or mandlebrot, the Jewish equivalent made “parve” with oil instead of butter.

Mandlebrot (also Mandelbroit) translates from Yiddish as almond bread. Jewish biscotti - my dessert of choice, and a staple in my mother’s cookie jar, and always on hand in my grandmother’s kitchen. My grandmother’s version was simple, yet sublime.  The ultimate coffee dunker: baked in small loaves, sliced, then returned to the oven for added crunch.My mother’s recipe was sweeter, lighter, the dough thinner, almost batter-like.   

In search of the perfect biscotti/mandelbrot, I can almost channel my grandmother’s recipe, and when I follow it, it’s out of a jumble of memories: the buttery baking aromas of her kitchen, the fragrance of roses and  tomatoes in her summer garden, her noodle kugel and cheese blintzes.

Now that I am a grandmother, myself, I keep my own “endless biscotti jar,” which means I make a batch nearly weekly as our one simple concession to dessert with expresso after dinner. I’ve also started my own tradition of sorts . . . constantly tweaking the ingredients, changing the proportions, adding variations of flavor, zest, liqueuers, spices. Fortunately, the basic cookie concept is very forgiving in yielding delicious results. With enough caffeine to be a stimulant in its own right, this particular recipe combines chocolate and instant coffee crystals, inspired by a recipe (for Chocolate Pound Cake) from the Joy of Chocolate, a little gem of a cookbook, by Judith Olney, (first published in 1982). For sensible proportions, I’ve also referred to a chocolate biscotti recipe from Dorie Greenspan.
—Vivian Henoch