Quick Fortune Made From Old Italian Treat : Small Business: A South San Francisco bakery making biscotti now sells $3 million worth a year. But six years ago, times were lean.

In only six years, Bonnie Tempesta has gone from zero to $3 million a year on the crunchy back of an Italian chocolate-lathered cookie called biscotti.

But she never forgets the lean times.

“Everybody who comes in here gets free cookies,” laughed the American baroness of biscotti, twice-baked, almond-studded morsels usually eaten after dipping in coffee or sweet wine.

La Tempesta Bakery Confections makes 40,000 cookies a day, along with a chocolate-lover’s confection called panforte, a rich, chewy slab of chocolate, hazelnuts, almonds, orange and lemon peel. Anybody with a sweet tooth would go mad with desire in her fragrant factory just south of San Francisco.

The elegant, seven-inch cookies, a traditional food in the Tuscan region where her family lived, are made from dough shaped into long loaves, baked in a slow oven, then sliced and baked again until they are browned and dry. Four different kinds of biscotti are finished with combinations of hazelnuts, almonds and chocolate.

While touring the 10,000-square-foot plant and its humming stainless steel machines, whirling chocolate pots and hot ovens, the energetic 36-year-old woman paused at boxes full of cookies that broke during packaging.

“We give away at least 3,000 pounds of these a year,” said the black-clad Tempesta, giggling as she explained.

. “If you put your foot in this place you get a pound of broken cookies free,” she said. “It’s the motto around here: Nobody leaves this place empty-handed. . . . I just think we should share the wealth.”

Tempesta started on her road to success in 1983. Newly divorced, she needed to make a living for herself and 3-year-old daughter Daniela. Tempesta went to work in a chocolate store in downtown San Francisco, where the owners wanted an Italian woman to make espresso and cappuccino.

“They asked if I knew a source for fresh, homemade biscotti and panforte. . . . I love to cook. I said, ‘Well, you guys are in luck,’ and I told them I had these great recipes for both those items. I made them every Christmas and give them to my friends.”

Every night she turned her kitchen in San Mateo, 20 miles south of San Francisco, into a steamy bakery. Every morning, she headed for San Francisco by bus with 12 pounds of desserts on her lap.

“That did it,” she recalled. “People were buying my products. I thought, ‘Wow! This is exciting. People really like it.’ ”

After a year of watching the cookies and chocolate march out of the store, she decided to take them to a food show in Washington, where she discovered nobody was making the traditional Italian treat.

With her mother, Aurora Marcheschi, as partner, Tempesta fired up a whirlwind of activity. She borrowed $15,000 from her brother, Cork Marcheschi, a noted neon light sculptor. Tempesta and her mom went into business Sept. 15, 1983. They were an instant hit.

“By Christmas season, only two months away, we were selling in all the great stores and wonderful delis around. Within the first four months, we started shipping to the East Coast.”

Today, Tempesta sells to some 3,000 customers around the country, including Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom, and her products will soon enter the Japanese market.