If you are visiting Venice Carnival, make sure you'll try all the food and drink!
In fact, it will perfectly complete your experience in the city during the funniest time of the year.
To be sure that you won't miss anything, we have prepared this simple list of the Venice Carnival food and drink that you have to try!
Be sure you try everything because most of the recipes we are going to list here are made only in this precise moment of the year!
Venice Carnival food and drink: 3 recipes you have to try
Venetian people wait the whole year for this moment.
After all the celebrations of Xmas, in fact, it's time for celebrations of a new kind to start. They involve many events, parades and shows. Of course they involve beautiful masks that enrich the city with perfect gowns.
However, what wraps all these things together is actually food.
What food do we eat in Venice at Carnival? Let's see!
1. The most famous sweets you have to try for sure
Frittelle are famous everywhere in Italy. However, Venice is their homeland. In fact, they were prepared in our city for the first time. People who actually prepared them were called "fritoeri".
This typical Venice Carnival food was once prepared with a dough made with eggs, flour, sugar, raisins and pine nuts. The dough then was fried in a pan with oil, lard or butter. After being cooked, the frittelle were sprinkled with sugar and displayed on large dishes.
Today you can eat these sweets anywhere in Italy but the recipe slightly changes from one place to another. You can find them enriched with a pastry cream filling and they are simply delicious.
In our city we love preparing the original recipe including raisins and pine nuts in the dough. Once they are cooked we cover them with sugar (while in other places they are covered with icing sugar).
In fact, this kind of sweets are called "frittelle veneziane" in Italian, the Venetian frittelle.
2. The Castagnole, another food you shall try during Venice Carnival
They could seem very similar to the frittelle. They are smaller and they also taste different.
They are little fried balls made with butter, sugar and eggs. Then flour, yeast and lemon zest are added to the dough. After the dough is made, little balls of dough are taken with a spoon and then deep fried in hot oil.
They are prepared all over Italy, but they are mostly famous in the North and in the central part of the country. In Southern Italy, there is something quite similar to these fried balls and it is called struffoli.
3. The Galani (or Chiacchiere or Crostoli), among the traditional sweets to taste
They have many names and slightly different recipes. In Venice they are called Galani.
The recipe was known since the time of the Roman Empire. They in fact prepared something similar to a lasagna that was fried in lard.
The Galani are thinner than the Crostoli (that are made in the rest of the Veneto region) but the recipe and the ingredients are the same. Flour, sugar, butter, eggs, lemon peel and a pinch of salt: the dough is rolled out to create a thin sheet and then fried in hot oil. After being cooked, the Galani are sprinkled with icing sugar.