Tortellini

Small squares wrapped round a fingertip, filled with pork and cured meat, served in broth.

Pork, Beef, Egg. Not vegetarian — contains beef, parmesan whose rennet the source does not name, pork.

Ingredients

• 300 g plain flour and 3 eggs, for the pasta
• 200 g pork loin, in small dice
• 100 g prosciutto crudo
• 100 g mortadella
• 120 g parmesan, grated
• 1 egg, for the filling
• nutmeg
• 20 g butter
• 1.5 litres clear capon or beef broth, to serve
• 1 teaspoon salt

Method

1. Brown the diced pork in the butter, 6 minutes, and let it cool. Then mince it with the prosciutto and mortadella as finely as you can.
2. Mix with the parmesan, egg and a good grating of nutmeg, and REST THE FILLING OVERNIGHT in the fridge. It firms and the flavours settle, and a loose filling squeezes out while you are wrapping.
3. Roll the pasta thin enough to read through and cut 4 CM SQUARES — small. A tortellino should sit on a teaspoon.
4. Put a filling the size of a pea on each, fold corner to corner into a triangle, and press the air out.
5. NOW WRAP THE TWO LONG POINTS ROUND YOUR FINGERTIP UNTIL THEY MEET, and pinch. That wrap round a finger is the shape, and it is what separates these from the agnolotti and agnolini already on the site.
6. SERVE THEM IN CLEAR BROTH, not in a sauce. Cook them in the broth itself for 3 minutes and bring the bowl to the table with the broth in it.
7. A hundred of them is an evening's work. They freeze raw on trays and go straight from the freezer into the broth.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Italy · All recipes