Cornetto al Pistacchio

Order this if you like a pastry that gives when you bite it. The crumb is soft and a little bready, and it leaves far fewer flakes on your shirt than a croissant does. It also tastes sweet before you reach the filling, because the sugar is in the dough, so the pistachio cream comes across as rich rather than as the single flavor in the room.

If you want crunch, butter and a crust that shatters, you want the other one: our Croissant al Pistacchio, which puts pistachio cream inside a French-style croissant: the same nut with the opposite texture. Why the two doughs bake so differently is covered in cornetto vs croissant, explained by a Neapolitan baker; read that instead of waiting for us to repeat it.

The filling is Bronte pistachio cream, made from the pistachio grown around the town of Bronte, on the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily. On top go chopped pistachios, which do something the cream cannot: they add bite and a roasted edge. Every mouthful gets the same nut in two textures, smooth inside and crunchy above, with soft dough holding them together.

On the counter, look for the swirled dough with a spoonful of pistachio cream and chopped nuts on its crown. Our pastry chef, Marco Giugliano, is Neapolitan-trained.

At an Italian bar a cornetto is ordered at the counter with a coffee, finished in a few bites, and that is breakfast. In the morning the coffee is usually a cappuccino, whose espresso gives a sweet dough something bitter to lean against. Ours goes well with a classic cappuccino, ordered at the same counter.

Nobody sits down for long over this in Italy. The cornetto is eaten standing, in roughly the time it takes to drink the coffee, and then the day starts. Ours is ordered the same way, at the counter, and you can eat it right there or take it with you.

If you would like a break from pistachio, the other filled cornetto on our shelf is the Cornetto Crema e Amarena, with pastry cream and sour cherry.