sfogliatelle

Our dear friends invited us over for dinner on Christmas Eve and I knew they would - as usual - treat us to a sumptuous meal and excellent wines. Hoping to live up to the culinary treats we were to enjoy, I decided to try to surprise Salvo, who is originally from Sicily, with a classic Italian dessert (albeit not from Sicily): sfogliatella.

The recipe is quite simple, except that I was not able to source candied orange peel despite searching high and low. So I turned to make it myself, lacking oranges and using clementines instead. Given the humidity we have had recently, it took quite a while for them to dry, but they eventually did and they are delicious! Once the candied orange peel was ready, I could prepare the filling, which consists of semolina flour cooked with ricotta, orange blossom water, vanilla, and candied orange peel. Then I could make the dough, which again is dead simple. The trick of course is rolling it out.

Lucky, Andy was around to help me roll it out. We must have rolled out 25 feet or more of the dough, which I then stretched wider, brushed with slightly warm lard, and re-rolled into a tight sausage. That spent the evening in the fridge and the next day I cut it into slices and pushed the slices out to make cones, which I filled with the ricotta-semolina filling. I froze them raw and then baked them from frozen at Julian and Salvo’s house while we were eating dinner. Dusted with a little powdered sugar, the result was a delightfully crispy, almost crunchy pastry, with a thick, delicately-perfumed filling!

I’d never had sfogliatelle before, but Salvo said they were quite authentic!