Pinyonate is a crunchy honey-coated biscuit dessert from the historical Sephardic Jewish community of the Greek island Rhodes. This dessert is quite tasty and unique, crunchy when you might expect chewy, almost like a sweet and sticky pretzel. The dough is made with flour and egg and cooked in a syrup of honey, sugar, water, and rose water. Nuts like almonds or piñones (pine nuts) can also be added. This dessert is related to the Spanish piñonate, Italian pignolata or struffoli, and Ashkenazi Jewish teiglach — and I’m certain many more honey-dough desserts across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and into India (e.g. gulab jamun). Those doughs, however, often have additional ingredients including yeast or baking powder, oil, sugar, liquor, spices like anise and cinnamon, or milk or soft cheese. Moreover, the dough is usually fried but sometimes baked before it is tossed in honey. In contrast, in the version from Rhodes, you boil the dough in the honey solution, lid on, mixing periodically.
Believe it or not, the most challenging part of this pinyonate recipe was not boiling what felt like a large amount of dough in a small amount of liquid, nor was it that I could only find three recipes on the internet to learn from. (For reference, last week I looked over at least 20 recipes when developing a sourdough himbasha recipe.) The real challenge was figuring out how to serve this sticky dessert when the tradition is to lay individual servings on lemon leaves, which are naturally non-stick. My suggestion is to either transfer the pinyonate to an oiled pan (like you might do with rice crispy treats) or pile it into a ring shape, as is done in Spain — and slice it to serve. Or create individual clusters of pinyonate in cupcake wrappers and just expect some sticky fingers.
In my research and testing of this recipe, the one I ended up liking and finding easiest was actually my mom’s recipe, passed down to her from my grandmother who emigrated from Rhodes to Argentina around 1915 after Jewish discrimination in Rhodes had begun to become intense.
Compared to the other recipes I found, my mom’s has you boil the dough in a more concentrated honey-and-sugar solution, which makes the process shorter. I don’t remember eating pinyonate when I was growing up; neither of my parents had a sweet tooth, but this recipe was published in 1977 in a Washington Post article about my mom’s healthy and spicy cooking. (Ample amounts of garlic and herbs are what earned the adjective spicy in 1977.) The article also features her recipes for lemon chicken, meatballs, and tortilla de espinacas (similar to Italian strata), which were staples of my childhood. As for the pinyonate, I suspect the journalist Marian Burros wanted to round out the article with a dessert and this was one my mom knew from her own childhood.
Here’s a brief video highlighting the dough texture and the transition of the biscuit color to a medium caramel brown. You can also see these steps in the Photo Gallery after the recipe.
Pinyonate (Sephardic Honey and Nut Pastry)
Pinyonate or pinonato is a pastry of crunchy honey-coated small biscuits and nuts from the historical Sephardic Jewish community of the Greek island Rhodes. It’s quite tasty and unique, almost like a sweet and sticky pretzel. Enjoy pinyonate for a dessert or as a snack with tea or coffee.
Total Time
1 hour, 35 minutes
Ingredients
Dough
Honey Solution for Boiling
- 150 grams honey (1/2 cup)
- 100 grams sugar (1/2 cup)
- 100 grams water (scant 1/2 cup)
- * 1 tsp rose water (see notes for substitutions)
Nut Additions
- 70 grams blanched toasted almonds or pine nuts (1/2 cup)
Instructions
- For the boiling, you want a tall-ish pot to contain the frothing. My pot was 4.5 inches tall and 6 inches in diameter.
- Beat the eggs in a large bowl with a fork. Add the flour slowly, continuing to beat the mixture, until it is too thick to use the fork. Switch to mixing by hand, adding only enough flour to be able to knead the dough without stickiness. Transfer the dough to a clean work surface and knead it until it is silky smooth, about 10-15 minutes.
- Cover and let the dough rest 10-15 minutes so it is easier to roll out.
- Divide the dough into four parts and roll each piece into a 1/2-inch thick tube. If it resists stretching, let it rest and work another piece. Cover the dough you’re not working with to keep it from drying.
- Cut the tubes into small pieces, about 1/2-inch long. They will expand when boiling and if they’re on the small size, you get more honeyed surface area.
- Combine the honey, sugar, water, and rose water in a pot and bring it to a boil on your smallest burner.
- Add the dough pieces in batches, mixing gently in between and making sure the liquid continues to boil and doesn’t cool down from the addition of the dough.
- Once all the dough is added and the liquid is simmering, lower the heat and cover the pot. Set a timer for 5 minutes but watch the pot for this stretch so you have a sense of how much heat you can use to not have the pot overboil. If you see the lid moving or steam coming out from under it, lower the heat. It’s okay to open the lid to release some heat if needed.
- When the timer goes off, remove the lid and stir the dough pieces. Put the lid back on and set the timer again for 5 minutes.
- Repeat for a total of about 7 times or 35 minutes. The boiling is complete when the liquid and biscuits are medium caramel brown (see the photos/video). If the liquid has reduced to being thicker and darker than what you see in the video, you can mix in a splash of water.
- Add the blanched toasted almonds if desired.
- As the syrup cools, it will thicken. When it is lukewarm, scoop clusters of pinyonate, nuts, and syrup into cupcake tin liners — or — arrange the pinyonate in a wreath shape on a greased platter or transfer the pinyonate to square pan. Serve by cutting with a sharp knife.
- Pinyonate can be covered in a tented fashion to avoid sticking. It will stay fresh for many days.
Notes
* If you don’t have rose water, you can omit it. One recipe I found (the first link below) calls for 6 cloves in the liquid. Recipes from Spain often have you flavor the oil that the dough is fried in with orange rind, and this seems like something you could do with the honey solution too: simmer the citrus rind for a bit and then discard.
Here are the pinyonate recipes I learned from:
Rhodes Jewish Museum Sephardic Recipes, pub 2008, pinyonate on page 84
Stella Hanan Cohen’s Sephardic Table Cookbook, Facebook, 2018 pinyonate recipe post
Sara Clapp’s recipe for pinonato in 1977 Washington Post article “The Spicy Side of Good Eating”
