As is often the case, the best recipes result from mixing experience and pure chance. The recipe for gluten-free sweet Tortelli with Venere rice and blue corn flour is an example! Having to prepare a cake for Gaia for a snack with friends, I realised, when I had already started weighing the ingredients, that I had run out of traditional rice flour.
In the pantry, however, I had two alternatives that I had tried in other preparations with great satisfaction, namely blue corn and Venere rice flour and I decided to use them to replace common rice flour. The result is a crispy, aromatic and tasty shortbread! After making the cake for Gaia, the leftover shortbread was used to prepare our beloved sweet Tortelli with the apricot jam my husband Stefano had made with the apricots from our garden.
Sweet Tortelli with Venere rice and blue corn flour
64.78g carbohydrates per 100g
Ingredients
- 200 g butter
- 190g sugar
- 170g wholemeal rice flour*
- 175g apricot jam*
- 150g multi-purpose flour mix, brand Massimo Zero**
- 100g flour mix for bread, brand BiAglut**
- 50g blue corn flour*
- 30g Venere rice flour*
- 3 eggs (2 whole + 1 yolk)
- 8g baking powder*
- a bit of vanilla from the pod
- grated rind of 1 lemon
**Ingredients specific for celiacs
*Ingredients whose labels must read “gluten-free” (or, in Italy, present on Prontuario AIC)
Preparation
- Mix all the ingredients, except for the jam, to make the shortcrust pastry. Let it rest for 15 minutes wrapped in cling film.
- With a rolling pin, roll out the short pastry into a strip about 15cm wide, place the apricot jam in the centre, fold the shortcrust pastry over and cut out the Tortelli using the specific mould.
- Bake in a static oven preheated to 180°C for 20 minutes until lightly browned. Super simple!

Sweet Tortelli with Venere rice and blue corn flour
Version with gluten of Sweet Tortelli with Venere rice and blue corn flour
Replace the gluten-free Massimo Zero and BiAglut flours (400g) with equal amounts of wheat flour using 2 egg yolks and 1 whole egg.