February’s recipe is from one of the said newer cookbooks I’ve obtained, the Soprano’s Family Cookbook as compiled by Artie Bucco that I randomly found at Half-Price Books! Note, I haven’t really watched the Sopranos, although I was interested in the Mafia and organized crime drama (not real life organized crime obviously) for many years, I didn’t have cable and wouldn’t have had the interest to watch several long episode seasons even if I did. But for the sake of my friend Chris, I watched an episode (directed by Steve Buscemi who is now my special interest) and clips of a few more episodes, so I am familiar enough to recognize the premise and the memes. Anyway, this cookbook is told in the style of each of the main cast so it’s pretty entertaining to read as a fan, but the recipes seem legit. I decided to attempt the hardest pastry in the book because we went to a local Italian bakery to try their sfogliatelle but it was apparently stale and inedible. So I figured, worst case scenario, I at least would not be making a stale pastry, it would a fresh hot mess!
(photo of sfogliatelle from my friend for whom I labored away for)
Ingredients Summary – should be all available at specialty or fancy high class grocery stores but I still couldn’t find candied citron so I used candied oranges
- pastry: flour, shortening, butter, honey
- filling: ricotta, egg, semolina (I used cream of wheat), orange zest, candied oranges, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon
Steps Summary – even more complicated than my previous handmade pastry, about the most complicated you can get, took almost 4 hours over 2 days
Make pastry, refrigerate (overnight). Cook up the semolina in water and sugar, then cool and add ricotta and egg and spices/flavors, then refrigerate. Melt butter and lard and roll out pastry into long thin sheets. Stack pastry sheets with butter/lard in between, then roll up the stacks into a big log and refrigerate. Then cut the log into 12 pieces and roll the spirals out flat and stuff the filling into the center and fold over. Bake, brushing with butter/lard at least twice, then cool and sprinkle with powdered sugar.
Taste Summary – tastes not too sweet, fluffy filling inside a somewhat flaky dough lol
- Taste – not too sweet pastry, with a slightly sweet textured filling that is full of warm spice and bits of bright chewy citrus, really good subtle flavors, I was not expecting a light hand from the Mafia
- Texture – I knew the crust was gonna give me trouble when I looked on youtube and the titles were “sfogliatelle- the most difficult Italian pastry!” and I watched one video from an Italian chef and they rolled it out on a pasta machine for extra thinness and flakiness. But this homemade version with no pasta machine was fine, it could handle being transported in the car and didn’t fall apart immediately in one bite. I would have been more impressed by the light and delicate “shell” effect made by the pros, however, I appreciated this fresh and kinda sturdy homemade texture on its own.
Convenience Summary
All right, here’s the story, I wasn’t planning on baking this pastry ever, I thought that stale one from the bakery was end of the story, but then I saw the cookbook for sale and I said I would one day try it. I bought ingredients at Christmas because I thought that would be a good time and also that’s when citron is on sale for making fruitcakes (except it wasn’t, not even at Trader Joe’s). Then I saw an ad for frozen sfogliatelle at Trader Joe’s and I was like, yay now I don’t have to make it at home, but I never did find it, at least not in January. So then I was like, Chris’s birthday is the next opportunity, now or never.
I knew this pastry would be difficult to make, and it was even more difficult because I didn’t have a big food processor, only a tiny single serving one, and also no mixer although thankfully I didn’t really need one, and of course, no pasta rolling machine. It was all hand kneaded and hand rolled. The only real downtime is cooling the dough overnight the first time and briefly cooling the log before shaping. Otherwise you are constantly working on the next steps, and even the baking is interrupted by brushing the pastry with lard. Extremely lengthy and labor intensive work. At least it was a special treat worth the effort! Would I bake sfogliatelle again? Umm not anytime soon lol. But I do have candied oranges leftover so maybe I shall bake something else from the book…