Torta Sbrisolona
A cake you break rather than cut, sandy with cornmeal and almonds. Mantua has made it since the Gonzagas and it has never needed changing.
Photograph credit: Sbrisolona by ho visto nina volare · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons · this resized copy is shared under the same licence
The Method for Torta Sbrisolona
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Mix the flour, cornmeal, almonds, sugar, lemon zest and salt in a wide bowl.
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Rub in the cold butter with your fingertips until the mixture looks like coarse gravel.
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Add the yolks and vanilla and toss with a fork until the crumbs clump in places. Do not knead or press it together.
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Scatter the crumbs loosely into a lined 26 cm tin, leaving the surface uneven and unpressed.
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Bake at 160°C / 320°F fan / 180°C / 355°F / gas 4 for 45 minutes, until deep gold and firm at the edges.
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Cool completely in the tin — it is fragile while warm.
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Dust with icing sugar and break it into pieces by hand.
Related guides: Prep, cook and total time · Pan and tin size.
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Things to Watch For
- Never press it. The crumbs must stay loose in the tin.
- Coarse cornmeal, not cornflour. The sandiness is the dish.
- Cool completely before you touch it.
Good to Know About Torta Sbrisolona
Do not bring the mixture together. The whole point of a sbrisolona is that it never becomes a dough — the ingredients are rubbed to a coarse crumb and then scattered into the tin, unpressed, so that the finished cake is a fragile lattice of crumbs fused at their contact points. Any pressing gives you a dense biscuit. Cornmeal is what makes it sandy rather than short, so use a coarse polenta grind rather than fine cornflour, and let the cake cool completely in the tin before you touch it.
To Go With It
Vin santo · Grappa · Coffee
Storing Leftovers
In a tin for 2 weeks and it improves for the first few days. Freezes 3 months.
Common Questions
How long does Torta Sbrisolona take to make?
20 minutes of preparation and 45 minutes of cooking, so at least 1 hour 5 minutes. The method also needs time for cooling completely, which it does not time, so treat that as a minimum. The recipe serves 10.
What's in a Serving
Per serving, calculated from the ingredient list with USDA FoodData Central figures (SR Legacy). A calculation, not a laboratory analysis: brands, cuts and how you measure change the real numbers. How the figures are worked out.
Your notes on this recipe
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Compiled by Turab
Checked by script for timings, diet labels and nutrition arithmetic. How the recipes are checked. Found a mistake? Tell us.
First published ; last changed .
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