Trader Joe’s Eggplant Parmigiana Sfogliatelle Review

We’re not going to lie: We had to look up a pronunciation guide for the word sfogliatelle today (and we did find one!) We also learned that it’s an Italian shell-shaped pastry dish that comes from the Campania region. In the United States, it’s commonly referred to as “lobster tail.”

So why did we do some Googling today? Well, it’s because we’re checking out the Trader Joe’s Eggplant Parmigiana Sfogliatelle, and we didn’t want to go in completely blind. We are still going into this one mostly blind, as we don’t think we’ve had this particular dish before, and we only have about five minutes’ worth of Wikipedia reading in our frozen-food-loving brains.

So let’s get cooking! This does need to be cooked in a conventional oven (or an air fryer, if you have one of those), so all the microwave mavens out there will have to turn on their neglected ovens. If you want to read the full cooking instructions for these, you can scroll down to the bottom of this review and check out our package scans.

According to the bag, there should be about twelve pastries in a bag, but ours only had ten. They are, however, slightly larger than we were expecting. For some reason, we were thinking each one of these was about the size of a tater tot, when in reality, they’re closer in size to a freshwater clam.

We may not have heard of sfogliatelle before today, but now that we’ve tasted it, we think it’s absolutely divine.

It starts with a flakey crust that’s made of paper-thin layers. This keeps it crispy all the way through, and it also gives it a delightful texture. This just feels satisfying to poke a fork into, and even more satisfying to bite down into.

Inside the shell, you’ve got a tomato-and-cheese-based affair, with diced tomatoes and tomato paste, as well as ricotta, mozzarella, and Grana Pedano cheeses. Then, of course, there’s a sprinkling of garlic to bring it all together.

This tastes like a high-end pasta mixed with a breakfast pastry, and the combination is almost intoxicating. This is some seriously delicious stuff!

Now, there are some chunks of eggplant in this dish, but we found them to be mostly forgettable. They’re diced into small, square-shaped pieces, and you won’t find a ton of it inside. It does seem a little bit rubbery, but to be honest, we kind of forgot it was even supposed to be here, because the rest of the dish is so outstanding that the mediocre eggplant hardly left an impression.

The package claims that two pastries is a serving, and that each serving contains 180 calories and 610 mg of sodium. That means that our ten-piece bag contains 900 calories and 3,050 mg of sodium. If you are lucky enough to have a twelve-piece bag, that jumps up to 1,080 calories and 3,660 mg of sodium. The bad news is that you’ll probably eat more than two. The good news is that this is surprisingly filling, and we don’t think you’ll end up eating more than half of the bag without feeling pretty stuffed.

We should also point out to our vegan and vegetarian readers that this product contains animal rennet, so it’s going to be off the menu for you. We’re sorry to report this!

The Trader Joe’s Eggplant Parmigiana Sfogliatelle is astonishingly good. We’re really glad we picked these up, and we’re definitely hoping we can get more on our next TJ’s run. These pastries really made our day!

To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for these Italian pastries, check out our package scans below.