The Ricciola of Ferrara with Municipal Designation (De.Co)

You cannot come to Ferrara without having tasted Ricciola: you can find it in every bakery, in every pastry shop in the city. Its smell fresh from the oven or slightly warm when taken from the bar in the morning, warms the heart and brightens the day.

In Ferrara, a University City, many university students carry in their hearts the taste of ricciola eaten during exams, a pleasant break from studying, a burst of energy.

It can be eaten for breakfast, for a snack or at any time when you feel like ‘something good’.

Some consider it savoury, some love it for its taste somewhere between sweet and savoury, some enjoy it with a cappuccino and others pair it with an aperitif or a good glass of wine.

So well-established is the use of Ricciola that little is known about its origins.

The origin of the Ricciola is quite recent, certainly dating back - especially for the type of ingredients used - to contemporary times.

When interviewing various bakers and pastry chefs in the city of Este, few remember the first appearance of ricciola in Ferrara: Ricciolina, or ‘pasta matta’, as someone called it in the beginning, seems to have suddenly appeared in the Ferrara people's customs in the mid 20th century, probably from a daily reuse of the day's leftover dough: ‘pasta matta’, a term still used in bakeries, sees precisely this reuse in a very current and modern perspective of recovery and sustainability.

The first version of Ricciola ferrarese seems to be ‘bread’, a typical baked product, brushed with egg and enriched with salt on the surface.

The evolution of the first version of bread was then the puff pastry version, richer and more enjoyable, typical of the years of prosperity where the palate also had to be fully satisfied, hence the entry into the pastry shops and bars of the city of Ferrara.