Hello again! I'm very excited today to share another pasta shape with you. Today
we're gonna be heading further north to Veneto and going to be covering a filled
pasta shape. This one is called casunziei, which is a type of beet filled half
crescent shaped pasta coming from the northern region of Veneto so close to a
Cortina and the Alps and to start today we're going to be making our egg pasta
dough and then we'll get into the filling later so for this pasta I'm
going to be making this traditional egg egg dough for pasta and the general rule
of thumb is about 100 grams of flour and one egg per person. Now for a filled
pasta you might want to do a little bit less than that because what the filling
it is a little bit heavier and a portion size is a little bit less pasta
per person so here today I have 200 grams of flour and two eggs and this
again is going to be for about three to four people depending on how hungry you
are if it's is your starter or your main so just get started right away I'm going to
pour my flour and this is '00' flour which is available in most
supermarkets on my work surface and just make a well in the center of the flour
you want your well to be big enough to hold both of your eggs so now I'm just
going to pour my eggs into the well and I've already cracked them for
convenience and starting with a fork you're going to whisk your eggs together
slowly incorporating flour from the outside of your well and this will
thicken up quite quickly once you get
once you get the flour incorporated and then once you get to that point it's
going to be a matter of switching to either using a pasta scraper to
incorporate or to using your hands so at this point just keep incorporating that
flour and I'm going to switch
to my hands and as I mentioned I'm to be making a beet filling later and the
traditional is really a kind of beet potato and ricotta combination sometimes
there's a little bit of Parmigiano Reggiano in there as well I'm
gonna change it up a little bit today partly because I don't have some of
those ingredients on hand and partly just because of the flavors that I want
and so I'm gonna be doing a beet ricotta and goat cheese combination and
I really enjoy the kind of combination of goat cheese and beets I think that
flavour profile is really lovely - feel free to try different combinations at
home and when I was kind of thinking about what I wanted to do I did try a
little bit of blue cheese with beets and I thought that blue cheese was a little
bit overpowering but you could try some combination like that or even just do
ricotta and Parmesan so feel free to play around. This filling is very
versatile so there are a lot of options when it comes to kind of what you want
to do again it's not gonna be the most traditional but that's okay as long as
you like it and you're enjoying it. It's okay to kind of break from tradition
every once in a while I know we did we tend to have our traditional dishes on
the menu but we also have some fun ones that kind of are playful and break from
tradition a little bit so feel free to meld the two together. So you see now my
pasta dough has come together. It still looks pretty rough so I'm just gonna
start kneading and that is gonna help break down the egg more and have
it combined with the flour and get a really smooth dough. So you're going to want
to keep kneading until you have quite a smooth dough and it isn't sticky anymore
to the touch so as you see I've kind of put off to the side the extra flour that
I didn't need. I am in California and so it's a little bit drier out here, actually
quite dry where I am so I'm not gonna need as much liquid so that's probably
why I'm not using all the flour that I measured out initially but that's going to
depend again your temperature, the size of your eggs,
your weather, your humidity, the type of flour you're using - there's a lot of
factors that go into the moisture content of a pasta dough and you'll have
to make adjustments as you're kneading and as you're making your dough to make
sure you get the right consistency. So now I'm just gonna keep kneading for a
little bit here. It does take a little bit of effort to get your dough where
you want to be but I will be sure to show you the consistency you're going
for once I get there. So at this point I have a dough that's really nice and soft
and it's come together really nicely so I'm gonna stop needing. If you see it
looks really smooth on the surface and then also when you push it in it bounces
right back and so those are two good indicators that your dough is ready so
at this point I'm just gonna clean off my surface. You just want to
get rid of any pieces of flour that incorporated egg
but didn't get needed into your dough because if you try and knead them in or
incorporate them now they're gonna be really tough and they're gonna stand out
as little pieces that aren't quite the same consistency as your dough so
you can just leave this on your counter cover it with a cloth, a damp cloth
or just dry cloth and let it sit for about thirty minutes to an hour
and then that'll help kind of get the dough ready to be rolled out. So I'll
come back in that time and I'll show you the rolling out process. Okay, so I'm
back and my dough is rested sufficiently so now I'm gonna go to rolling it out
with my pasta machine. You can do this with a rolling pin but I find a little
bit quicker to use a pasta machine and it leads to more even thickness in your
pasta sheet. So to start I'm going to cut off medium-sized piece of dough you can
just quickly kind of flatter with my hands and starting on your thickest setting on
your pasta machine you're going to just roll it through
Mine is sticking a little bit so I'm just going to coat it with a little bit of
flour to help fix that and you can also, I liked on the first setting just
fold it in on itself a couple of times and that will just be a final way to get everything really consistent
if there are any drier spots from where it's been sitting out exposed. So now I'm just gonna
keep adding a little flour so it doesn't stick to the machine and keep rolling it through. Once it rolls
through pretty easily you can go on to the next setting. I tend to do one or two
times through each, more when you're in the wider settings at the beginning
and then it'll be a little bit easier once you get to the narrower settings.
So as you see, we're just going to keep going
So at this point you see it's starting to get a little bit thinner but we're
still not probably the thickness that we want for our filled pasta dough so I'm
going to continue to roll it out. Once you get to this thickness you probably won't need
to add any more flour. You don't want to incorporate too much flour at this stage
it's really just to keep it from sticking to the machine because if it is
a little bit too too moist it will roll up into the rollers and you'll kind of
one, make your machine a little bit dirty but also not lead to very kind of
well rolled out dough so it's just important to really make sure it's not
sticking. As you see I'm able to roll through and it's not sticking at all so that's
through to our thinnest layer. We're just going to roll it out and place it on this board
and as you see it's it's quite thin. You can't kind of see through it. It's going to
show this gonna be a nice thickness for your filled pasta so at this point I'm
going to go ahead and stuff these and show how that's done and then we can
move on to rolling the rest of the dough because I don't want this sheet to dry
out too much because you do have to seal your ravioli or your casunziei. I'm
just gonna get back and grab my filling and go through that process really
quickly and then we'll get to stuffing our pasta. So now I have my filling right
here and I've already mixed it and blended it because you do need to use a
food processor so I wanted to do that ahead of time and let it sit and firm up a
little bit before filling my my pasta. So here it's very simple I have taken about
two medium-sized beets and roasted them in the oven and then peeled them and put
them in a food processor to puree them. You do want a pretty fine texture so using
something like a food processor or blender works really
well. If you don't have those on hands you can chop them, just try to chop them
as fine as possible because that's going to make it easier to fill your your
pasta and then once I did that I mixed those with about a quarter cup of
ricotta and about an eighth of a cup of goat cheese. It's not that much - goat
cheese has a pretty strong flavour. You do want to use a fresh goat cheese not
an aged goat cheese because that's not gonna blend as well. I threw in a little
bit of pepper, a tiny bit of salt and that's my filling. It's quite easy again
feel free to adapt it add different types of cheese if you wanted to do a
little bit of the potato to be a little more traditional you can do that as well
so now I have my filling in my pasta sheet we're gonna get started. This is a
kind of half-moon shaped pasta filled pasta so that means you need to make a
circle of dough kind of put a dollop of filling in the middle and then close it
into that half-moon. I don't have a ravioli cutter or a cookie cutter that
is a circle so instead I kind of searched around the house and found
various objects that will allow me to cut a circle so a lid an old ice cream
container. if you have a mug that will also work. There are a variety of different
options kind of look around your kitchen I'm sure you can find something if you
are really struggling to find something that'll cut through the pasta dough - you do
want kind of as narrow an edge as possible to cut through the dough - you can always
put down your kind of guide and cut around it with a knife. It'll just take a
little bit longer. So I'm going to go through and just take each and as you
see even I'm having a little bit of difficulty getting that to cut through
It doesn't have to be perfect so that's my first circle so I'm just going to cut a
few so we can fill a few at once. That one cut a little bit better. And you do want to work a little bit quickly
while you're doing this because you don't want your pasta dough to dry out
too much. If it dries out too much you will have trouble sealing it. However
there's kind of a neat trick where you just moisten the pasta dough
a little bit with water and then you'll be able to steal it without
issue so that is a workaround if you do find your pasta dough getting a
little bit dry. I have a feeling I'm gonna have to do that to seal some of
these as they have just been sitting out as I've been talking to you but that's
not a problem, it will work just fine in the end. Then another thing is if you see all
these end pieces that is kind of around what I've been cutting. So pasta dough
like this you really can't like with pie dough you could take this back up and
make kind of a crust but with pasta was really hard to do that just because it's
going to end up quite tough when you go through that process again so
instead of doing that you can make what we call maltagliati, which means kind of
badly cut in Italian as you see the name is apt because they are indeed badly cut
and you can throw those into a soup, boil them and kind of mix them with a sauce
do whatever you would like and that's just a really neat way to kind of use up
any spare pieces of pasta dough. Okay, so now we have one of our circles I'm going
to take kind of a nice spoonful of filling and put it in the middle of my
dough real quick and then I'm just going to close the pasta dough around that and
you really want to make sure that you one, don't close in any air into the
filling so you want to go kind of from one edge of work around and then just
make sure you have no air left. I feel a slight air pocket right there which I'm
going to try and get out. The reason for that is when you stick this in boiling
water and there is a pocket of air and it has a greater likelihood of bursting
the ravioli and causing kind of the fillings to gonna float out into the
water which is is not what you want. So I keep referring to ravioli because I'm
used to making ravioli - casunsiei as we're making today are these beet
filled pasta shapes. So that's our first one you can see he's kind of ready to go
there so in a place him to the side and just keep
going and keep making these little filled half-moon shapes and you do want to have
enough filling to kind of get the whole kind of have a sizable bite to your
casunziei but you want to do want to be able to have a really firm close
around the filling because again you don't want it to burst while it's in the
boiling water because then you're filling ends up in the water and not on
your plate. I think that one found had maybe a little bit too much I'm gonna
try a little bit less and see how this goes. So far my pasta dough is sealing
pretty well with no need of adding kind of any more water. If you do do that just
grab some water you can just take some water on your finger and go around the
edge even just half the edge works because that'll help bind the two
together. Let's see if it makes it any easier to close this guy so it does it does
make it a little bit easier to close so feel free to do that if you are
struggling with the closing and sealing your pasta
My last three here so this one's gotten quite dry so this will need a little bit moisture
water to help seal it so do you see I'm just going around half and then as soon
as you kind of seal that together it closes much much more easily and
you're really able to get that nice seal and again I'm just putting them when
they're done on this wooden board. They tend not to stick too much to wood
depending on how moist your dough is. That said we are working with a
fairly wet filling. Most of your feelings probably are going to be, that is the nature
of them so you might want to add a little bit of flour to whatever surface
you put your your fill pasta on while you're waiting to kind of cook them just
to make sure they don't stick as I have run into that being an issue in the past
and it's kind of no fun to try and peel up all of your filled pasta that you've just done
a lot of work sealing to be able to cook them. Here's my last one this one feel a
little bit more moist I don't think we're gonna need any water - looks good. Okay, so I
have my first batch made. Now I still, as you know, this dough to get
through so I'm going to just go straight ahead with making the rest of it and
circle back when they're all done. So now you see I have kind of made most of mine
and I'm on to the last few to finish. So at this point again my dough is still
kind of moist enough to close without water. It helps if you, I found that it
helps, if you kind of use the side that's facing down to fill - that'll help
keep it so you don't have to add water because it is a little bit moister
than the side that was exposed to air while you were rolling things out and cutting your
shapes some see I might be a little bit short I think I can squeeze two more out
on filling but if you look it was about correct, I do have of my maltagliati
to throw into something tomorrow and
make another kind of pasta dish on the side. It's going to be very lightly
filled but that's okay and last one. I'm just going to get all the filling out of this bowl.
Last one and for a sauce for these it can be very simple butter sauce - it goes
really well. Filled pasta tends to do well with a
butter sauce because you do want to accent that flavor in the filling and
so you don't want a really strong sauce because that's really gonna detract from
your filling and that is the main focus of a filled pasta. So I'm gonna do a
butter sauce tonight. You could do sage butter. You could also do butter with a little bit of
poppy seeds sprinkle on top, that pairs really nicely with the beet and the goat
cheese. Apart from that, buon appetito! Top with a little bit of parmesan - Parmigiano Reggiano.
And you'll be set. So these are our casunziei filled with
beet and goat cheese and I can't wait to eat them tonight
Buon appetito!