From down the street, Antonio Mattei Premiata Fabbrica di Biscotti hits you with an aroma that unnervingly smacks of Hansel and Gretel. You know it even if you don’t. The street-side shop is all white marble and wooden shelves piled high with tin and cardboard hat boxes. The backside is a cavern of conveyor belts and massive mixers, all politely chugging away.

Across it all wafts a comforting blend that suggests sugar, cinnamon toast, citrus and almonds. Welcome to the home of biscotti, the shop that probably didn’t invent the crunchy cookie-like biscuit we love—credit for that likely belongs to long-ago ladies who lived in the rolling hills that surround the town—but most certainly turned it into a worldwide iconic treat.

Antonio Mattei Premiata Fabbrica di Biscotti—literally, Antonio Mattei’s Award-Winning Biscotti Factory—has been baking in Prato, a textile town in Tuscany, for nearly 170 years. Mind you, at the start they were better known for their breads and pastas. That didn’t change until the Mattei family sold to the Pandolfinis at the end of the 19th century.

That’s when Thomas Pandolfini leaned hard into selling what was then and remains now a five-ingredient, twice-baked biscuit. More on that in a moment. The brilliance was in the marketing. Those hat boxes, all emblazoned with a cobalt blue label that in Europe can be used only by Antonio Mattei.

It was an early version of a two-for-one special: Buy a box of biscuits, get a free hat storage box. It worked, and the company has been shipping their biscotti around the world ever since.

As for the biscotti, the recipe hasn’t changed: sugar, flour, eggs, almonds and pine nuts. All of it twice baked, a preservation trick by those same local ladies. Even today, the folks at Antonio Mattei—still run by the Pandolfini family, producing 22,000 biscotti a day—say the treats are good for at least a year.

The exact recipe remains a secret, but that crunch is key. I grabbed a biscotti off one of the conveyor belts—at the stage after the dough had been shaped into a flat log, baked once, then cut into thick cookies, but not yet subjected to the second baking—and the flavor was amazing. Slightly crunchy, a lot chewy, tasting of warmth and comfort.

But it wasn’t ready, the bakers assured me. So I grabbed another from further along the conveyor (and despite the mechanization of movement, most everything else still is done by hand), this one baked a second time and cooled. Wonderfully crunchy, toasty and begging to be dunked in coffee or a bit of vin santo.

But again, they wouldn’t share the specifics. So for that, we turned to Giulia Scarpaleggia, a cookbook author who lives in nearby Colle di Val d’Elsa. Her situation is nearly as storybook as Antonio Mattei. Imagine the sun-drenched Tuscan villa where she lives with her husband, child, parents and grandmother, all sharing ridiculously delicious meals.

Her biscotti begin with those same simple roots, but with a few tweaks that make all the difference. Flour, eggs and sugar, of course. But she also adds a touch of honey, which gives the finished biscotti a welcome hint of chew that bridges the gap between the finished and not-quite-finished cookies I tried at Antonio Mattei.

She also leaves out the pricier pine nuts in favor of more (cheaper and crunchier) almonds. This is cucina povera, after all. Finally, in a nod to the citrus-loving Medici family—a 15th-century powerhouse from nearby Florence—she adds orange and lemon zests, which play perfectly with the almonds and honey.

The resulting biscotti were perfect—crunchy and crispy, with the barest bit of chew at the center, plus tons of floral-citrus notes that again begged for that vin santo (but would be satisfied by coffee, if you must). And while a hat box would be a lovely container, I’m not at all convinced they would last nearly long enough in my house to merit such fancy storage.