The One Recipe Laura Vitale Hasn't Mastered

Renowned chef and the personality behind the YouTube show Laura in the Kitchen, Laura Vitale is a gifted cook. As her website says, she's someone who taught herself to cook and her journey first began when she was a kid, looking up to her grandmother in Italy for inspiration. Later in life, she benefitted from her dad's foray into the restaurant business and was actively a part of his New Jersey eateries where she further explored her passion for cooking.

Laura Vitale has given her fans many gifts in the form of delicious recipes that are easy to recreate at home (via the Cooking Channel.) Some of her most celebrated recipes include pork loin, scallops accompanied by delicious pancetta, a pesto pasta dish replete with sausage and broccoli rabe, and leftover brownie truffles, among other magnificent dishes. Despite this self-taught chef being so experienced, there is one recipe that Vitale still is trying to get right. Here is the full scoop.

Laura Vitale once told Philly Voice that she still finds herself struggling whenever she attempts to make the classic Italian dish, sfogliatella. Wondering what that is? As per Taste Atlas, this is a sweet dish that has several versions available depending on which part of Italy you're from. The sweet is believed to have been created first near the Italian Amalfi Coast, where the pastry originally included custard cream and black cherries doused in syrup. These days, it's common to find sfogliatella to be "multiple layers of paper-thin dough arranged in a clam-shaped pocket, filled with a delicious cream made with semolina, water, ricotta, sugar, eggs, cubed candied fruit, cinnamon, and a pinch of salt," according to Taste Atlas.

This dish has evaded Laura Vitale so far. The chef revealed in a candid confession that she's still trying her best to recreate the perfect version of the pastry. She told Philly Voice, "I got the filling down pat, but the actual pastry part is so difficult. If you want to make it in a traditional way, you have to do it justice." She added that she particularly struggles with ingredients that she doesn't work with often, such as lard.

Vitale is definitely not the only one. A Redditor wrote that even though her husband is a big fan of the dish, she finds the recipe to be overwhelmingly difficult and thinks she can't make sfogliatella on her own. Phew.