Get a tasty bite of Bay Area Biscotti

Max Jacobson

Wednesday, July 5, 2000 | 9:37 a.m.

When you enter the tiny office and display area at Bay Area Biscotti, the air is redolent of star anise and lemon peel, from cookies constantly being baked in an oven. This small but efficiently run facility belongs to an entrepreneurial charmer named Arlene Damele, who nine years ago moved to Las Vegas from the Bay Area.

For those of us who do not frequent espresso bars or Italian bakeries, biscotti are hard, usually long and narrow Italian cookies most often eaten while drinking coffee or espresso.

People such as food broker Marvin Spath, who met Damele at a fancy food show, says that they are the best biscotti he has ever tasted. Frank Sinatra and Nicky Blair loved her biscotti, or so say the signed, framed photographs of those men in her cramped office. Her twice-baked, thumb-sized cookies are sold in retail food stores such as Wild Oats and Albertson's. They also crop up in gift baskets, amenity baskets and various other guises around our city.

These are the biscotti you have eaten at the Jitters Coffee Shops, where they are still sold, and in large venues -- casinos such as MGM, Luxor, the Rio and Excalibur. When you encounter them in packages, notice that the name, Biscotti Dameli, reflects a small change. Damele decided that changing the final vowel in her name made her cookies sound more Italian. She thinks like the entrepreneur that she is.

Damele is quick to say that her company is a labor of love. She's also in the executive search business and she has her own local firm for that as well. In the small Bay Area Biscotti office, there is a plaque awarded to her from Distinguished Women of Southern Nevada, perched above various food samples from her industry.

She actually began making her biscotti while living in San Leandro, Calif., just east of San Francisco. She and her husband moved here mostly because they liked the weather. She says that she never actually intended to make biscotti here.

But four months prior to her move here, in 1992, she got her first big account, the El Dorado Hotel in Reno. At that point she was baking her cookies in San Rafael, Calif., and her big new account meant that she needed more space. So while staying at her newly acquired condo here, she discovered a local bakery for sale, and inquired within. Soon after that she bought the bakery and turned it into Dameli's, a gourmet coffee and bake shop where she made, in her words, "great muffins, breads, pastries, brioche and biscotti, all from scratch."

That lasted until 1994, at which point the bakery's lease ran out. At that point she had many loyal customers and was at a crossroads. So in 1995 she leased her current location with the intention of manufacturing and selling her cookies wholesale. And here she remains to this day, in a 1,800-square-foot location capable of turning out around 1,000 pounds of biscotti per week. That's no mean feat for a staff that numbers only four full-time employees.

During a brief tour of the facility, the cookie-making process is revealed. The dough is composed of all-natural ingredients and flavorings. Errant, individually wrapped pounds of butter sit piled up on side tables. "All my biscotti are twice baked," Damele says. "That's what gives them their hard crunch." And yet, these are not what one would call hard cookies. They retain a nice crumbliness and are dynamite with a cup of steamy espresso, or for that matter, plain old American joe.

The process is relatively simple. First the cookies are baked in a loaf, at 350 degrees for 45 minutes, and then they are allowed to cool before being cut. Then they are baked once again, for 18 minutes at the exact same temperature. The result is a cookie that has a firm snap, but not a resistance to the teeth. To show the contrast, she displays biscotti made by a larger commercial producer. They are literally rock hard on the teeth.

Should you buy these biscotti commercially, you will pay $3.99 for a 6.5-ounce bag. The bag contains approximately 42 cookies, a figure determined by multiplying the servings per container (7) by the number of cookies per serving (6). Read the label further and you will also discover that there are 130 calories per serving, 50 of which are fat calories. Not bad.

These are delicious cookies. For the purist, the best flavor might be star anise, which is the one closest to what one might find in Italy. Lemon peel has a pungent, pure flavor, and hazelnut has a nicely grainy texture. There are also a pair of chocolate-dipped biscotti, which naturally are richer and more caloric. One delicious option is Orange Decadence, which combines the natural flavors of orange and chocolate. Another good one is Marbled Decadence, essentially a vanilla and chocolate-dipped cookie.

Damele will sell to the public if people come to the facility. That means that a bag of cookies that retails for $3.99 becomes available at $3.10, for savings of more than 20 percent. She also says that any of her products are available wholesale, for those who come by.

This creative woman isn't through planning. She'd ideally like to move her facility to Henderson so that she can conduct tours for the groups that visit places such as Ethel M Chocolates.

Furthermore, she says, "it's always been my dream to open a smokeless piano bar, where I can sing and play the piano. I used to sing quite a bit when I was younger," she muses, "and I'd like to do it again."

Momentarily, she reveals that she does not yet play the piano, but she's geared up to learn. She'll probably sell a lot of biscotti and espresso at the piano bar whenever she opens it.