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Pinyonate <\/em>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<\/strong>. The dough is made with flour and egg and cooked in a syrup of honey, sugar, water, and rose water. Nuts like almonds or pi\u00f1ones<\/em> (pine nuts) can also be added. This dessert is related to the Spanish pi\u00f1onate, <\/em>Italian pignolata<\/em> or struffoli<\/em>, and Ashkenazi Jewish teiglach \u2014 <\/em>and I\u2019m certain many more honey-dough desserts across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and into India (e.g. gulab jamun<\/em>). 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.<\/p>\n Believe it or not, the most challenging part of this pinyonate<\/em> 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<\/em><\/a>.) The real challenge was figuring out how to serve this sticky dessert when the tradition is to lay individual servings on lemon leaves<\/strong>, 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 \u2014 and slice it to serve. Or create individual clusters of pinyonate<\/em> in cupcake wrappers and just expect some sticky fingers.<\/p>\n In my research and testing of this recipe, the one I ended up liking and finding easiest was actually my mom\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Compared to the other recipes I found, my mom\u2019s has you boil the dough in a more concentrated honey-and-sugar solution<\/strong>, which makes the process shorter. I don\u2019t remember eating pinyonate<\/em> when I was growing up; neither of my parents had a sweet tooth, but this recipe was published in 1977 in a Washington Post<\/em> article<\/a> about my mom\u2019s 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<\/em>), which were<\/em> staples of my childhood. As for the pinyonate<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n