Making stuffed pastas can seem like a very daunting task for home cooks, but can be a great and impressive thing to show off to your family and friends. I want to take the fear of making these pastas away, as they can be pretty simple once you get the basics down, and a lot of these shapes involve very similar processes.
Once you understand how to make one stuffed shape, the others will come much easier. With that being said, let's walk through the steps of a great starting point pasta: caramelle. This shape is relatively easy but stunning and will give you the confidence to tackle any stuffed shape out there.
You’re going to need to start with an egg pasta dough, I recommend this recipe from one of our previous blogs.
Once you’ve made your dough and allowed it to rest, you can begin rolling it out and creating your shapes. While this can be done by hand, I strongly recommend using a pasta machine as it will give you a much more consistent end result. I’m using the Atlas 150 which is a great machine.
When making any stuffed shape, I find it helps to work in small batches of dough for a couple of reasons. First, the dough will be rolled very thin so it will end up being a lot to work with. Second, rolling out too much at a time can result in the pasta drying out before you get to it making it impossible to work with. So, cut off a small piece and roll it with a pin until it looks like this, thin enough to fit in the machine and an even shape that fills out the width of the machine as well.
Now start passing it though starting on the widest setting, increasing the number every time. Since we're going to be cutting sections out of this, I'm not so worried about having a perfect rectangular sheet, but it shouldn't be super irregular either. Using the Atlas 150, I rolled my sheet to an 8. Now using a paring knife, we are going to cut small rectangles, about 3 X 3.5 inches out of our sheet. They should look something like this:
Now, take one square and either pipe or spoon your filling in the bottom-center of one of the sheets like so:
You can really use whatever you want for filling, so long as it's somewhat stable and can hold its shape. I’m using a mixture of cheeses here, but I have added some cream cheese for some stability. Mascarpone and ricotta also work great for this. Now we are going to start to fold our shape by folding the bottom lip of the sheet over the filling, then folding one more time until we reach the end of the sheet.
Now we have this tube-like shape, and this is where it gets fun. There are a couple ways to finish this shape, and as the name caramelle implies, it's supposed to look like a piece of candy. So to finish, I pinch the ends so one flap goes up, and the bottom lays flat, like so:
Now as you create them, lay them out on a floured sheet and either freeze them or cook them within a day or so.
I cooked mine up right away with some brown butter, radicchio, roasted cherry plums and toasted almonds.
If you want to get hands-on experience with making stuffed pastas, join us at our next Pasta Boot Camp on Saturday, August 17 at 10am. You will master all of this:
- Whole Wheat Pasta Dough: Pumpkin-Filled Agnolotti with Brown Butter and Sage
- Ricotta Pasta Dough: Hand Shaped Cavatelli with Sunday Meat Sauce
- Semolina Dough: Hand Shaped Orecchiette with Sautéed Shrimp, Greens and Chili Flakes
- Roasted Beet Dough: Fettuccine with Blue Cheese Cream Sauce
- Classic Egg Dough: Lasagna with Roasted Garlic Tomato Sauce and Walnut Pesto
