Hello YouTube,
Sharing my experiences making Spinach and Ricotta Tortellini for the first time, from scratch.
For all the food snobs out there I’m aware that spinach and ricotta is normally made with ravioli, but I find tortellini more exciting and don’t always like to follow conventions when it comes to cooking.
Any questions, thoughts or feedback feel free to leave them in the comments.
Peace!
Pierre
This is homemade spinach and ricotta tortillini marinated in a sage and butter sauce. In this video, I’ll walk through the steps necessary to create this beautiful dish as well as some issues encountered whilst making it. Without any further ado, let’s get into it. Grab 200 g of type 00 flour. This one is an allpurpose flour by Kaputo. Form it into a volcano shape on your worktop. It’s supposed to be better than a bowl, although you can use one if you prefer. Crack two whole eggs and one with the yolk only in the center. Add some salt. Then break the eggs and gently pull flour from the edges to the mix, aiming for a thick orange-like texture. If the flower walls collapse and it gets chaotic, like in my case, don’t stress. Just mix in bigger chunks of flour to form a crumbly dough. Knead the dough for about 8 minutes on your counter. If it’s still dry and flaky after 5 minutes of kneading, then spritz it with water using a spray bottle. Or if you don’t have one, just coat your hands in a little water and continue kneading. After a few spritzes and a few minutes more kneading, it should feel smooth and dough-like. At this point, you want to try and form it into a ball, tucking the excess to the underside and then flattening the bottom with the surface. Wrap it in plastic and let it rest for 30 minutes. This will give the dough enough time to hydrate and create a gluten structure. It’s time to make the filling. Heat a splash of olive oil in a pan. Add 120 grams of spinach with a pinch of salt and cook until wilted. Move it to a sie. Press lightly with a fork to drain excess liquid. Then chop it finally on a chopping board. Add a pinch of salt, pepper, and ground nutmeg. Mix the spinach with 250 gram of ricotta. I used way too little here, by the way. Recipes often call for 60 g of parmesan and a squeeze of lemon, which unfortunately I’ve forgotten, but this should be added, too. After 30 minutes, unwrap the dough and cut the dough in half so it doesn’t get too big for the machine. Set up your pasta machine and feed one half through. Starting at setting zero and working down to setting seven for a thin sheet. Somewhere in between this process, the ends will start to taper into an oval shape. So, you’ll want to spray them with water, fold them inward, and then run them through again and again to form a rough rectangle. It doesn’t need to look perfect. Just an approximate rectangle will do. Lay the sheet on your counter and trim the ends for a straight edged rectangle. I used a tape measure to get a roughly straight top edge, but honestly, you can skip this step and have more perfect squares if you just invest in some pasta cutting wheels. Without a wheel, you could just use a knife to cut 3-in squares with long straight cuts vertically and horizontally. But I didn’t do this. Conscious of my drying pasta. To speed things up, I folded a corner diagonally to make a square. Cut off the excess and use that as a template. Guaranteed your squares will be uneven with this method, but it’s quicker than using a tape measure if you don’t have something like a meter stick handy. Also, don’t stack them like I did. They’ll just stick together so that when you try to pull them apart, they’ll turn rectangular just like this. Put the filling into a piping bag with a nozzle. Or just use a spoon if you don’t have one. Piping might be messy if it’s your first time, but it gets the job done. Place a small marble of filling in the center of each square. And once that’s done, now comes the forming of the tortillini. Pick up a tortillini and spritz the edges of each square with just a little water. Fold into a triangle and press to one layer thickness to seal. Then wrap the pointed ends around your finger, pinching also to one layer thickness to avoid any uncooked or crunchy bits. Some edges may have dried out if you left them out for too long on the worktop like I did. So, they may crack or fray when it comes to forming a ring, but it’s just a visual imperfection. They will still taste great. Just cover them next time if you plan to leave the pasta sheet on the worktop for slightly longer durations. Next, bring a pot of water to a gentle boil and throw in a handful of salt. Then, drop in the tortillini. In about 3 minutes, they’ll float up, indicating they’re cooked. Drain them and set them aside. Then, in a pan, melt butter with a splash of olive oil. Add chopped fresh sage and fry for a couple of minutes. Add the tortillini and toss it in the sauce for a few minutes. Then plates up. Finally, sprinkle a hefty amount of parmesan on top to garnish. Now, take a bite and you’ll be amazed. They’re absolutely delicious. The dough is tender. The ricotta is creamy, contrasting with the more natural and slightly bitter spinach with a hint of nutmeg. Finally, the sage sauce ties it all together with its aromatic flavor flowing through every bite. I would love to make these again, but only if I was equipped with a set of pasta cutting wheels. So, leave a comment if that’s something you’d like to see, or leave one if you have any questions about the video. If you enjoyed this video, give it a like and a subscribe. There’s many more culinary adventures which I’m actively planning to embark on. So feel free to come and join me on this journey. But until the next time, I’ll see you in the next one.
Dining and Cooking