Have I already mention how much I like pastry and bakery? I love that stuff! Last year I tried doing my first cinnamon rolls at home. I tried the regular (vegan) version with white flour, and also whole wheat flour recipes. All of them are great 😊. While doing the sfogliatelle, I had a dejavù: I thought I was making rolls. I guess it’s just because in both recipes there’s some sort of rolling involved. Also, there’s butter/oil spread over the dough.
Every time I try a new recipe I look forward to learning something new. But, at the same time, I keep an eye on opportunities to reutilize something I learned in the past. I think this is key in cooking (and in life!). Trying to remember what worked well in the past, how can we use something that served us in the past. In this recipe, I did just that when I replaced the margarine with coconut oil, a healthier and tastier alternative. That’s how I did it with the cinnamon rolls (coconut oil instead of vegan butter 😋). If you’re doing baking vegan, make sure to always have coconut oil nearby!
Recipe of the Week: Sfogliatelle
When I saw the sfogliatelle for the first time, they reminded me of the Argentinian “facturas“. The sfogliatelle are pastries filled with jam and lemon cream (many “facturas” have also a creamy filling). And the Italian ones are also sprinkled with powder sugar! Before even getting started, I had been told that this was a hard recipe to prepare. But I wasn’t discouraged! 😁 Actually, I looked forward to a good challenge.
The recipe I chose used “vegan pasta sfoglia” for the preparation, which makes the whole thing much easier. Just for one thing: I didn’t know where to get “vegan pasta sfoglia” in Buenos Aires. To say the truth, I didn’t even search for it. I just assumed I wouldn’t get it. The closer I could get was with a filo/phyllo, but I wasn’t sure I could get even that one. So… I tried searching on YouTube and I found this:
I was tricked with the title (“homemade, no eggs and no butter”). I thought it would be a vegan recipe. It was not, but was close enough! I just needed to replace the regular yogurt with coconut yogurt. I’m not sure how much the end result might have differed from the original one with this change. It’s hard to guess!
The sfoglia dough takes a good deal of time to prepare. You need to fold, stretch and leave the dough to rest. And repeat that several times. The last time I stretched the dough on the table I realized it wouldn’t be wide enough to get more than two or three pieces. To “stretch” the dough even longer (and wider!) I ended up pressing it more than necessary after I had rolled it as a cylinder.
One other thing I needed to prepare separately was the lemon cream. I followed the recipe, but decided to add more cornstarch as indicated to get a thicker consistency.
The recipe of the Sfogliatelle:
The visual result of the sfogliatelle is not bad 🙂. I believe the dough maybe was not fatty enough for this kind of recipe. I expected something more like a “factura”! These were kind of dry. The filling was sweet and creamy though. I really liked that!
New Vocabulary
This week I created 13 Anki notes in something like four or five cards (some had multiple new words). I did it this way because one of the videos had no subtitles and the other didn’t have the Italian language set. But, in any case, I got something out of it! It’s good to know that video descriptions are also a valid source of new words and phrases 😁.
That’s all for now! 😊
