Taralli from Flavors of Puglia

These savory cookie-like things from "The Flavors of Puglia" book interested me because they use a high percentage of semolina, with wine and olive oil but no water; they're also boiled before baking, like bagels. I'm annotating the recipe with metric here.

The author, Nancy Jenkins, points out that Puglia produces a lot of hard durum wheat so they use "semola" which we refer to as "semolina".  The texture is not as fine as conventional wheat flour but what we buy is more like a sand texture, more coarse than "flour" but not as coarse as most corn meal.

You can use 1 Tbs crushed black pepper corns or 1 tsp red pepper flakes, or other flavorings as you wish. The New York Times has other variations in two different recipes.

  7 g     2 tsp  Yeast
250 ml    1 cup  Dry White Wine at 38C=100F
420 g     3 cup  Flour, All Purpose
325 g     2 cup  Flour, Semolina
125 ml  1/2 cup  Extra Virgin Olive Oil at 28C=80F
 10 g     1 tsp  Salt
 20 g     2 Tbs  Fennel seeds, crushed in mortar

Toss the yeast on the warm wine, let bloom, then mix.
Add to other ingredients.
Knead in a stand mixer with dough hook: it should come together like a stiff bread dough -- if it's too dry, like mine was, drizzle in more wine until the crumbly bits come together properly.
Form dough into ball, place in bowl and cover with film and let rise 30 minutes or more.

Pull off a golfball-sized chunk of dough and roll into a 25-cm / 12-inch snake; divide into 3 and roll into a pencil- or pen-thick snake about 15-cm / 6-inch  long.
Loop like a ribbon and press the ends to seal.
Lay on parchment or something the dough won't stick to, and do all the rest.
We had 3 cookie sheets worth of loops.
Divide dough into pieces about the , roll each into a snake the thickness of your little finger, cut into 4-inch 10-cm pieces; loop and connect the ends like a ribbon or doughnut.

Preheat oven to 190C=375F.
Bring a pot of water to boiling, drop taralli in a few at a time.
When they rise to the surface, skim out and drop onto a kitchen towel to dry.

Arrange boiled taralli on cookie sheet and bake at 190C=375F for 15-20 minutes until brown and crisp.
Remove and let cool on a wire rack where they should finish getting crisp.

These were mildly flavored of fennel seed, but I think it could be punched up a bit. Perhaps next time, saute the fennel seeds in the oil to extract more flavor.  I also think they would benefit from salting the boiling water to get a zing in each bite.