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pasticciotti Siciliani with butternut squash jam

I am certain of one thing. Sicilian and Neapolitan pastry are, by far, my favorite ones.


ingredients for 25 pieces (total cost about 5 € with organic products)

for the frolla dough

  • 250 g pastry flour
  • 100 g butter
  • 75 g superfine sugar
  • zest from 1 lemon
  • 1 medium egg
  • 15 ml milk
  • 4 g baking powder
  • 1 g bicarbonate of ammonia
  • 2 g salt

for the butternut squash jam

  • 300 g pulp of butternut squash
  • 120 g sugar
  • 120 g water
  • 10 ml lemon juice
  • zest from 1 small lemon
  • a pinch ground cinnamon stick
  • a pinch salt
  • icing sugar to sprinkle

Whenever I prepare something Sicilian or Neapolitan, I never regret it. And I keep finding out more and more masterpieces, always made with simple, cheap, everyday ingredients.

The Sicilian “Pasticciotti con Zuccata” are prepared with a low buttered a frolla dough, that is stuffed with a fragrant squash jam. For the jam in Sicily they use a green long squash, called “cucucha”, that resembles a big long zucchini. Unfortunately, in Greece I can not find them, but I discovered that the butternut squash makes an excellent jam as well, with a bright orange colour, a velvety texture and a “buttery” flavour!

So, we begin by making the jam. We peel off the skin from the pumpkin and we remove seeds and filaments. We weight the collected pulp, then we measure 40% of the pulp weight in sugar and water. In this case, the pulp was 300 g, so I measured 120 g of each sugar and water. We cut the squash it into small dice, we put them in a pot, we cover with the water, we add lemon juice and a pinch of salt, we bring to a boil, then we semi cover it with a lid. We cook the squash, until it’s soft enough to fall apart when handled. We turn off the heat and we puree the butternut squash with the immersion blender, then we pass it through a sieve, to ensure a smooth, velvety texture.

We add half of the sugar to the mixture, we turn the heat on again and we boil the mixture, while stirring with a spatula. We scoop away any skim that forms, then we lower the heat, we add the rest of the sugar and we cook the mixture, without stopping to stir. We turn off the heat just before the mixture reaches the desired level of thickness. Keep in mind that the final jam should be rather dry, so that it does not release liquids inside the pastries. We grade the zest from the lemon over the jam as well as a pinch of cinnamon and we stir to incorporate. We keep in the fridge.

Meanwhile, we prepare a portion of our “basic frolla dough for Italian stuffed pastries”, using lemon rind as an aromatic and we let it rest in the fridge for at least 1 hour. Then we take the dough out of the fridge, we place it on a well floured working surface and we knead it for a few seconds to re-soften it.

You can find the way to prepare the magnificent frolla dough HERE

With a rolling pin, we roll out the dough into a disk of about 3-4 mm thickness. Using a round cookie cutter of 6 cm diameter we cut out discs. We use the left overs to roll out the dough again and we cut more discs, until we have used all of the dough. The resulted discs should be even in number (normally if you use an 6 cm cutter, you will end up with a total of 50 discs).

We arrange half of the discs on a baking tray covered with parchment paper and we add about a teaspoon of pumpkin jam on the center of each of them. We should need about 150 g of the jam. Then we cover the stuffed discs with the remaining ones and we press them all around the filling with our thumb to seal the edges well. Using the same cookie cutter, we press over each pasticciotto to trim the edges. With a skewer, we make a hole in the middle of the top of each pasticciotto, so as to let the steam escape during cooking.

We bake the pasticciotti in a preheated oven at 180 degrees – static function (or 160o for a ventilated oven) for about 13 minutes or until the surface of the biscuits is only slightly golden. Keep in mind that they should remain soft. When ready, we remove the pasticciotti from the oven and we let them cool on a wire rack, then we generously sprinkle with icing sugar.

If you have patience, listen to me and wait for a day, before tasting them. As with all pastries containing ammonia, they get better every day.

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Published in DESSERTS

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