Daring Bakers 11-13: sfogliatelle

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After 9 months, I’m back with another Daring Bakers challenge! I’m so happy to be working on these again, especially since we had such a fun challenge this month :) We had to make sfogliatelle, which is a traditional Italian pastry. I knew it by name but had never seen or tried one before; over here it’s sold in just a few places, sometimes only at request.

Now I know why! These pastries are pretty time consuming. They’re a lot like puff pastry, but you roll up the dough instead of folding it, and then you open up the layers before baking them to get the overlapped look.

The basic dough is just water, flour and salt; I made it on my stand mixer and let it do the kneading, for about 10 minutes (Sandie recommended kneading the dough with a pasta roller, but I was too lazy). The dough needs to rest because it’s pretty tough and needs to be rolled super thin; I left mine in the fridge overnight.

Then comes the hard part: the rolling and buttering and stretching and rolling!

Fortunately I had my pasta roller to do the hard work for me, and it came together pretty quickly. I rolled all of the dough (divided into 4 strips) while my mom was making one phone call :P (needless to say, my mom talks a lot).

Then I spread each strip with the butter-lard mixture (which I beat on the mixer for a while; it doesn’t remove all the lumps but it’s ok). At this point you should stretch the dough to give it some width; at first I neglected this step cause I thought the dough was ok like that and I didn’t want to break it, but then when I had to stretch one strip to match the previous one, I saw that it was really easy.
Anyway, I ended up making 2 smaller rolls instead of one, which got me 24 smaller pastries.

For the filling I used the recipe Sandie provided, which was a ricotta-semolina filling with candied orange peels. I made the peels myself and it was fun, even though they almost burnt, but what can you expect from leaving sugar on the stove unattended for 20 minutes.

If you want to make the sfogliatelles, which I totally recommend, here‘s the recipe :) There’s also a recipe for another version of the dough, and for American lobster tails.

And by the way, I’d like to use this opportunity to pass my condolences to Lis’ friends and family. I never spoke to her but I can tell from everyone’s sayings that she was so nice and friendly. And we should all thank her for creating such an amazing community!

Blog-checking lines: Sandie of the lovely blog, Crumbs of Love, was our November hostess. Sandie challenged us to make a traditional Italian dessert, along with its American version – Sfogliatelle (or better known in the US – lobster tails!) The flakey, 1000 layers of super thin dough, shaped into a horn and filled with a scrumptious filling. Così buono!


6 thoughts on “Daring Bakers 11-13: sfogliatelle

  1. I tried to knead my dough in the KitchenAid but it wouldn’t come together – I’m super impressed by your patience that it worked for you :) Your sfogliatelle look awesome!

    • Thanks! I formed a ball of dough first and then it divided into smaller bits on the machine, but I think it still counts as kneading :)

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