Another adventure in which your intrepid cook blogging friend (ie me) tackles pasta parcels. This time it was agnolotti, and I had the help and wonderful company of my friends Ben and Jessie.
Agnolotti became something I knew I had to try after I saw this video. You really can't argue when there's an Italian Mama making pasta, like it ain't no thing. I really want one of those big dough-spatula things by the way.
Anyway, It looks like a really easy and quick way to make stuffed pasta. Why go through all the pain and fiddlyness of wrapping every single ravioli parcel when you can roll, wrap and cut? Well. More on that later.
For stuffing, we decided to go seasonal with artichokes (despite the fact that the only artichoke hearts I managed to find were in a tin). I thought the stuffing from this recipe looked the bomb, so that's what we did.
It's worth mentioning now that Jessie and Ben are keen home-brewers, so the genesis and consumption of this dish was characterised by their amazing tea wine - yes, TEA WINE. Oh, and also something they called 'death juice', which I think is basically as close to being pure alcohol as it's possible to get, or close enough not to make a difference anyway.
The tea wine was, I believe, based on a similar recipe to this one. And though it still had some time to go before it was properly mature, it was a lovely, refreshing drink that got me all zealous about home brewing. And probably a little bit drunk.
So, on to the pasta-making (via the terrifying pasta-dough face. Terrifying).
By and large, it went well. I say by and large, because actually - shock horror - it's not quite as simple as it looks. As you're squeezing parcels from a big long tube of filling, it's easy to slightly over-fill them, and also to give too little space between each parcel-section. However, Jessie and I overcame the resultant little rips and tears with some frankly excellent patching and wrapping with extra bits of pasta.
When I eventually read the recipe to the end (I know, right - too often I do this as I'm going. Once I thought I had timed a chocolate tart perfectly to come out of the oven for pudding for a few friends, only to read the last bit of the recipe, which detailed the need to let is set for two hours. It was a very sloppy tart), I noticed that it's for a baked dish. Well, why not try it, we thought. So into a dish went the agnolotti, complete with extra-filling sauce and a bit of cream. I decided it also needed some breadcrumbs on top, because breadcrumbs make everything better.
The verdict: delicious. A filling which was brimming with flavours, none of which combatted each other, plus the infinite joy of eating pasta one has made oneself. Yes, that exists. However, we did think that it's quite strange to bake agnolotti, or ravioli, or any stuffed pasta - why bother making the shapes when the structural integrity of what you end up with may as well be a lasagne dish? And yes, I just wrote 'structural integrity'.
It's definitely better to have agnolotti in a bit of sauce (and maybe sprinkle some pangrattato - breadcrumbs - on top). Just because.
Anyway, this was, all in all, very very tasty. Especially with tea wine. Cheers!
