Italian national cuisine abounds with numerous pasta cooking options.
Macaroni is a generic name for hundreds of types of pasta.
Many have seen cannelloni pasta in stores. They are made from durum durum wheat. In most cases, no eggs are added to the dough - only water and flour. However, the concept of "pasta" for Italian cuisine is too narrow. There are a myriad of different pasta names. It is easy for a foreigner to get confused. Of paramount importance is the form.
Cannelloni or manicotti?
One of the national dishes of Italy is stuffed cannelloni. It is a tube filled with minced meat from unleavened dough. They are baked in the oven with tomato or white sauce. It is incorrect to think of cannelloni that these are large hollow cylinders designed to fill the filling.
Paste of this form is really used for stuffing, but it is called manicotti. And cannelloni is a plate of dough in which the stuffing is wrapped like a roll. You can say about cannelloni that these are small rolls. Dough plates for them can be confused with lasagna plates, but they vary in size.
Cannelloni toppings
Cannelloni stuffed cooked with various fillings. It can be minced meat or smoked meat with feta cheese, seafood, vegetables, cheese, mushrooms, cottage cheese and so on. Cannelloni pasta will fit both in the menu of vegetarians and in the diet of fans of meat dishes.
This article provides detailed instructions for making cannelloni with spinach. This is an amazing dish, but the filling can be made from other vegetables - cauliflower, broccoli, rhubarb, artichokes, asparagus, etc.
Cannelloni dough
If you are told about cannelloni that it is a very simple dish, do not believe it. Italian housewives rarely buy pasta for them, preferring to make it on their own.
They knead a rather steep dough of flour, water and salt, roll into a thin layer, put the filling on it and wrap it in a roll, which is cut into equal parts. The resulting mini rolls are brought to readiness in the oven.
This dough can be stored in the refrigerator for about five days. Such rolls are not the easiest, but very tasty dish. In order for your first
cannelloni to work out, the recipe with the photo will help you not to get confused and maintain the sequence. The main thing is that the paste is not digested. It must be
al dente, that is, elastic.
If you follow the instructions outlined here, you can make excellent homemade Italian cannelloni. Spinach and the cheese with which they are stuffed go very well with tomato sauce made from fresh tomatoes and mayonnaise.
Cannelloni with spinach. Ingredients
For the test you will need:
- 2 cups durum wheat flour;
- 4 chicken eggs at room temperature.
For the filling you will need:
- 2 tablespoons of butter;
- 1 kg of coarsely chopped fresh spinach;
- 3 heads of thinly chopped green onions;
- 200 g of ricotta cheese;
- 100 g prosciutto ham, cut into small cubes;
- 3 tbsp. spoons of grated parmesan;
- salt to taste;
- ground black pepper to taste.
Cooking Spinach Cannelloni
Make the dough
Pour flour onto the table and make a depression in the center. Break the eggs into the flour and gently mix them with the flour using a fork. Start from the center, slowly, in a circular rotation, stir the eggs into the flour. If the dough turns out to be liquidy and sticky, add more flour. Knead the dough. It should be well behind the hands, be elastic and firm enough. Sprinkle the dough with flour, wrap in polyethylene and leave it on the table for one hour.
Now let's get stuffed
Melt the butter in a very large skillet over medium heat. Put spinach and onion in it. They do not need to fry.
Let them only slightly give juice, lose their elasticity and become soft. Do not put all the spinach at once, as a large volume is difficult to stir. Add it as the greens settle, until you fit all. Put ricotta and ham into the filling, salt, pepper, sprinkle with parmesan and mix well. Remove the pan from the heat and cool completely.
Roll Formation
Pour a lot of flour on the table and spread over the entire working surface. Expand the dough and roll, if possible, into a rectangle.
Determine the size by the capacity in which you will cook it, laying it evenly, without bending. Most suitable are dishes such as goslitsyatniki or a rectangular pan-stewpan with high sides. The roll is cooked, completely immersed in water.
On the rolled dough, put the filling and distribute it evenly over the entire surface, leaving a free border of one centimeter in size along the edges. Gently roll the dough with the filling into the roll, helping yourself with a pastry scraper. Wrap the roll in gauze so tight that it does not spill. Here you need some skill. Try not to get the filling out. Tie the ends of the gauze with a thread and cut or bend so as not to deform the roll.
Cook the roll and serve
Pour water into the goose bowl or deep pan, bring to a boil, lightly salt and dip the roll into it. It should boil over low heat for about one hour. If the roll protrudes above the surface of the water, then for uniform cooking, it should be turned over every ten minutes. After an hour of low boiling, remove the roll from the water and leave it on the table for ten minutes. After this time, it can be freed from gauze, cut into pieces and pour sauce, as in the photo.
You got a real national dish of Italy. Now you know about cannelloni that it is not just big pasta with filling. This is a very original roll. It is sometimes made using ready-made lasagna plates, but this is just an imitation.