A real holiday dish, hearty and full of colours!!!
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 5 € pp)
- Salt
- 240 g fresh spinach pasta (as you prefer with or without eggs)
- Half a portion of ragù bolognese
- 500 ml milk
- 40 g butter
- 40 g flour
- 30 g parmigiano reggiano or grana cheese
Canelloni and lasagne preparation is a whole chapter in cuisine. These beautiful and very tasty preparations are mainly selected for Sunday and holiday meals as they need a reasonable time to be prepared and cooked.
Canelloni and lasagne dough can be aromatized with almost everything and contain almost everything. The dough can be plain or aromatized with spinach, nettle, porcini, beetroot, saffron and generally with any substance or ingredient, which has pigmenting and aromatising properties. The stuffing can be from all kinds of meat, fish, seafood, vegetables, mushrooms and generally with substances that add umami to the dough. The whole preparation is finally dressed with a sauce which usually is a tomato one or a bechamel.
A question that I will never be able to reply is what Ι do prefer, lasagne or canelloni? The truth is that canelloni are more attractive and more adequate for special or holiday meals, meanwhile lasagne are more “casual” although they are one of the most common Italian Sunday dishes. At the other part lasagne have this continuous alternation between pasta and sauce(s) which offers them a higher complexity in the mouth. I don´t know, I ll never resolve this query. Anyway.
Let´s prepare our canelloni.
First of all we have to prepare the sauce (να μπει το λινκ με τα Μπολονιέζικα ραγού) and the fresh pasta dough. I know ready canelloni shells are on sale and can be easily found.
You can use them, but:
a) They need precooking (don´t listen to the lies written on the package)
b) It is more difficult to fill them than to roll them around the sauce, as we can do with the homemade pasta dough
c) They are about 2.548.508 times worse than the fresh ones.
So, just read our special guide to pasta fresca, which you can find here, prepare the dough, cut it in 8 pieces and form 8 equal, relatively thin, rectangular pieces (pasta machine at 4 or 5) of pasta dough. I know, it is not too easy for a beginner, but all beautiful things in life are difficult, easy things usually are garbage.
We also prepare a Bolognese ragù sauce, we can find here how to do it.
We then have to prepare “la sauce Bêchamel” as our French friends would say. I also know that we can use cream instead of bechamel but in this case I would suggest you to order a portion of canelloni from an Italian restaurant of your neighbourhood. Even the resto canelloni, dump and cold as they always reach at home, will be better than canelloni with plain cream. Bechamel sauce is unique, it elevates all preparations.
So, first of all we heat the milk in a small casserole. In a heavy bottom and relatively wide pan we heat the butter and when it starts to foam we add the flour, whisking continuously in order to avoid the creation of lumps. We add the milk, a little by little, whisking continuously and we gently simmer till the creation of a sauce. We must have in mind that the bechamel for canelloni must be relatively thin as it will be cooked for 45 minutes in the oven, so don´t overcook it. We add salt, pepper and if we want a spice (nutmeg is the most common) and we set aside.
We lightly grease with butter an oven pan with a similar width of the long side of the pasta rectangles and with a little bit bigger length.
We start filling with the ragú sauce the pasta dough pieces (some cooks also add a spoonful of bechamel) trying to cover all of its length. We close the pasta dough pieces, forming cylinders and we arrange them, sealing side down, in the baking pan. We try not to leave a big gap among canelloni. We pour above the canelloni the bechamel sauce and we even it with a spatula.
We cover the pan with aluminium foil and we bake the canelloni for 20 minutes at 180 Celsius degrees. We remove the foil we sprinkle with the cheese, which must be grinded very thinly, we cover again with the foil and we bake for 20 minutes more.
We remove the foil, we raise the heat to max and we bake for 5-10 minutes more. We remove the pan from the oven and we wait at least 15 minutes to cool.
