Cheese and ham, just what the kids want
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 2,5 € pp)
- Salt
- 500 g fresh pasta with eggs
- 20 g butter
- 50 g milk
- 100 g parmesan
- 4 prosciutto or jamón serrano slices
- black pepper
- fresh mint
A year ago I had to create a special menu for a sports hotel restaurant. A famous Italian adolescent team had booked the whole building for 20 days and I had to plan special breakfast, supper and dinner for such a period of time. And the real problem was that among the hotel clients there were a lot of kids.
Kids have peculiar preferences. They like meat, spineless fish, potatoes, pasta, cheese and cold meats. That´s all. So I had to create some dishes based on these ingredients.
One of them was the dish you see at the photos. Fresh pasta, parmesan cream (the hotel was too luxury for plain cheese) and a crunchy good quality cold cut. The dish had a great success as the hotel cooks later told me.
So, we first prepare the fresh pasta. If you don´t remember how, just click here to read a full guide.
We continue by preparing the crunchy ham. So, starting from a cold pan we fry the jamon slices till crunchy, using always gentle temperatures. We don´t use additional fat. When ready we remove the solid parts and we break them in small pieces.
We then prepare the tagliolini. We cut the fresh pasta in very thin stripes (2-3 mm). We bring to boil a pot with salted water.
Meanwhile we make the parmesan cream. We heat the milk with the butter at 63 Celsius degrees. We start adding the parmesan, very finely grated, whisking continuously the mix. When a cream will be created we add some pepper.
When the water temperature reaches the boil point, we lower the heat and we add the tagliolini. We stir with a big fork, but very carefully as tagliolini are very fragile. After 2 minutes we drain them and we carefully mix them with the ham oil. If they are too dry we add some butter.
We put a ring mould on each plate and we add some tagliolini. We remove the mould, we add the parmesan cream, crunchy ham and some fresh mint and we serve.
