Torta di nocciole recipe: Cortemilia's Piedmont hazelnut cake

This torta di nocciole recipe follows the hazelnut cake of Cortemilia, in Piedmont's Alta Langa: toasted hazelnuts, eggs, sugar and butter, with only a little flour. The technical key is the nut itself. Hazelnuts make up 40 per cent of the batter, so they have to be toasted to the centre, skinned and ground without turning oily.

The cake began as a farmhouse Christmas sweet, baked with nuts left over from the summer harvest. Local pastry cooks later set rules for a torta Cortemilia: Nocciola Piemonte IGP hazelnuts at 40 per cent or more, with flour or vanilla baking powder the only extras allowed, according to the town's Confraternita della Nocciola. The new crop came early: Confagricoltura said in August that Piedmont's 2026 harvest, on 27,000 hectares, began about a week ahead of 2025, though heat and drought cut yields.

Ingredients

In a torta di nocciole the hazelnut is not a flavouring: it is the flour, the fat and the point.

• 300 g shelled, unskinned hazelnuts, ideally Tonda Gentile IGP
• 130 g caster sugar
• 4 medium eggs (about 200 g), at room temperature
• 80 g unsalted butter, plus extra for the tin
• 30 g plain flour, plus extra for the tin
• 1 pinch fine salt

Method

1. Heat the oven to 160°C and toast the hazelnuts on a tray for 12 to 15 minutes, until the skins crack and the centres turn pale gold. Underdone nuts taste green; overdone ones turn bitter in the second bake.
2. Rub off the skins in a clean tea towel and leave to cool completely. The skins are bitter, and warm nuts release their oil in the processor.
3. Pulse the cold nuts with 30 g of the sugar in short bursts until they look like coarse sand. The sugar soaks up oil and stops a paste forming.
4. Melt the butter and let it cool until lukewarm. Raise the oven to 180°C, then butter and flour a 23 cm round tin.
5. Separate the eggs. Whisk the yolks with 70 g sugar for 5 minutes, until pale and thick. That air, with the air in the whites, is all that lifts the cake.
6. Stir the lukewarm butter into the yolks, then the ground hazelnuts, flour and salt. Hot butter would deflate the foam and start to cook the yolks.
7. Whisk the whites with the remaining 30 g sugar to soft, glossy peaks. Stir a third into the heavy nut base to loosen it, then gently fold in the rest, so the air survives.
8. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until the top is deep golden and a skewer comes out dry. Leave in the tin for 15 minutes, then turn out onto a rack.

Zabaione, Moscato and a day's rest

The cake is better the next day, once the butter has set and the hazelnut aroma has spread through the crumb. In Cortemilia the slice gets warm Moscato zabaione poured over it, with a glass of Moscato d'Asti alongside.

For a savoury course from the same hills, try our tajarin with white truffle from the Langhe while the Alba white truffle season gets under way.