Pine Nut Cookies

Pine nuts are expensive, and should be celebrated when you have some. These pine nut cookies, pignoli in Italian, are just the thing. I make them with wild, American pine nuts, but you can use any kind of pine nut for this recipe.

Now normally I am not much of a baker, but I do love my cookies, especially cookies with wild ingredients, like these pine nut cookies.

You’ll notice a little bit of rosemary in these cookies, which can seem weird. It isn’t. The combination of pine nuts and rosemary is a natural: pine and “pine,” as rosemary’s resiny, piney nature works well with the nuts. You can skip this if you want.

Almond Paste and Substitutes

Because these pine nut cookies are based on traditional Italian pignoli, they use almond paste as a base. You can buy almond paste online, in many supermarkets, or make almond paste yourself.

However, since I am a hunter-gatherer type person, I decided to substitute the almond paste in my pine nut cookies with homemade acorn paste. Yep, you read that right. You make it exactly like almond paste, only using acorn flour.

I have written a whole primer on eating acorns, as well as a specific recipe for acorn flour, if you want to go that route. This is how I make acorn paste, or almond paste, for that matter:

You will need:

• 1 1/2 cups of acorn flour or almond meal (140g)
• A heaping 1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar (70g)
• A pinch of salt
• 2 egg whites
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Mix all this together well with a spoon or a food processor, and you have essentially acorn marzipan. Nifty, eh?

Technically marzipan, whether made from almonds or another nut, is much sweeter than almond paste. It’s also less important that the paste be super smooth, too; marzipan needs to be very finely ground.

The Nuts in Pine Nut Cookies

I use wild pine nuts for my pignoli, from our local pinon pines, Pinus monophylla. There’s another excellent pine nut pine tree, P. edulis, that grows in the Mountain West. You can also use our local Central Valley bull pine, P. sabiniana, which has tasty nuts, but the shells are harder to crack.

Here are primers on how to harvest pine nuts, and how to work with bull pine nuts.

Or, you know, you can buy your nuts for pine nut cookies, as most do. If by chance you can find real Italian pine nuts, pay the extra money. They’re tastier, and they will never give you that nasty “pine mouth,” you can get from fraudulent Chinese pine nuts.

That said, 99 percent of you will likely have to make do with Chinese pine nuts, so it’s a game of roulette. Pine mouth comes from nuts of a different species of pine from the regular Chinese nuts, and unscrupulous vendors have adulterated the good ones with the bad ones.

One recipe note: Toast your pine nuts in a dry frying pan over medium heat, tossing and stirring often, until they begin to brown just a little. Move them to a bowl so they don’t burn. Do not walk away from this process because pine nuts burn very easily.

Making Pignoli

Once you have all your ingredients, making pine nut cookies is pretty easy. Mix all the ingredients and bake.

There is one tricky bit, though. Sometimes the mixture is too wet, and you can’t realistically roll the dough into balls to roll in the pine nuts.

Two ways to fix this:

• First, if you want your pine nut cookies to be gluten free, start with only one egg white. This will keep the dough a little drier and more rollable.
• However, you really want lots of egg white in your pignoli because it provides a little bit of lift, and really helps prevent the cookies from falling to pieces. So I use 2 egg whites add a couple tablespoons of flour.

Once the pine nut cookies come out of the oven, let them sit for a few minutes to start cooling — they’ll be molten at first and you won’t be able to pick them up — then, once they have set, after about 5 minutes or so, dust with confectioner’s sugar and move to a cooling rack.

Store them at room temperature in a closed container for a few days while you eat them all. You can freeze pignoli, but I’ve always just eaten them all first…

If you liked this recipe, please leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ rating and a comment below; I’d love to hear how everything went. If you’re on Instagram, share a picture and tag me at huntgathercook.