He said whenever anyone on the show would say sfogliatella, they'd be bombarded with requests for a recipe.

Bite into the crunchy, vanilla-scented sfogliatella if you doubt me.

The pastry is baked until the layers separate, forming the sfogliatella's characteristic ridges.

Having eaten sfogliatella on every holiday excuse since childhood, I've developed a discerning taste for this invention.

The ideal/real sfogliatella had materialized.

This Neapolitan institution has been serving local dessert specialties like baba, a rum-soaked cake, and sfogliatella, a ricotta-filled pastry (each $1.90), since 1860.

The sfogliatella defines Naples no less than its pizza, Baroque architecture, the Archeological Museum and the bay with its islands.

The shop, in the Piazza San Dominico, makes such pastries as sfogliatella, which one eats while standing, accompanied by a frothy cappuccino, about $1.50 for both.

Recalls Sciolone: "He [Chase] said, 'We must have a recipe for sfogliatella', a pastry very popular in Naples.

Sadly, in recent years I've seldom been rewarded in my search for the ideal/real sfogliatella, except for its consistent perfection at De Lilo's Pastry in the Bronx.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - One New York City chef spent a year mastering a trans-fat-free version of his sfogliatella pastries.

For dessert, the classic ricotta-filled fan-shaped pastry called sfogliatella napoletana is reason enough to visit Naples, and Don Alfonso's version, with black cherries in place of candied fruits, was beyond perfection.

The sfogliatella Santa Rosa was created in the monastery of Santa Rosa in Conca dei Marini in the province of Salerno, Italy, in the 17th century.

As if guided by years of sfogliatella discontent I stepped into Pintaura, a tiny pastry shop on the Via Roma and found tiers of sfogliatella, piping hot from the oven.

In addition to the inevitable baba and pastiera, the homemade desserts included tegola (tile) di cioccolato (chocolate) and the shell-shaped pastry known as sfogliatella filled with custard and black cherry instead of the usual ricotta and candied fruit.

WHAT WE LIKED Mushroom soup, pizza, linguine with white clam sauce, veal parmigiana, scialatielli with mushrooms, radicchio and speck; tilapia livornese, pork chop ciambotta, pork osso bucco, chocolate pizza, sfogliatella.

In Neapolitan cuisine there are two kinds of the pastry: "sfogliatella riccia" ("curly"), the "normal" version, and "sfogliatella frolla," a less labor-intensive pastry that uses a shortcrust dough and does not form the sfogliatella's characteristic layers.