I don't like to brag, but tonight I think I've made myself quite proud.
I just consumed my own home-made cannelloni pasta filled with my own home-made Bolognese sauce and smothered in my own home-made beciamela sauce.
Now I have to say, before I continue, that most folks outside of Italy don't quite get what Bolognese sauce is supposed to be. Here in America, particularly, "Bolognese" typically refers to tomato sauce with meat, like ground beef. True Bolognese sauce, as I discovered in Italy, is still a meat sauce. Except it's a sauce made almost entirely of meat. I took veal, pork, pancetta (that's Italian style bacon), and a soffritto of onion, carrots, celery, and garlic, and I cooked it all for about four hours. This resulted in a tasty, fine-grained ground meat sauce that formed the filling to my cannelloni.
The cannelloni itself, for the unfamiliar, are pasta tubes. The dish with the same name is essentially a meat-filled version of manicotti. Now I actually made the pasta from scratch as well. It's super easy, super cheap, and ever since my first home-made pasta experience, it's difficult to buy the dried stuff at the grocery store.
Finally, I made a home-made besciamella sauce which is the Italian version of the French "mother sauce" called a bechamel. This sauce follows a nice 5-4-3-2-1 ingredients list: 5 tablespoons of butter, 4 tablespoons of flour, 3 cups of milk, 2 teaspoons of salt, and 1 healthy pinch of freshly ground nutmeg. While I heated the milk in one pot, I created a roux with the butter and flour. After cooking out the raw flour flavor, I added the simmering milk a little at a time to the roux and kept heating until the sauce was a nice thick consistency. I finished it up with the salt and nutmeg.
I piped the Bolognese onto blanched squares of my fresh pasta and rolled them up, placing each one onto a thin bed of tomato sauce in a baking dish. I covered everything with the besciamella and baked it in the oven for the better part of an hour.
Okay, after all that build up...it is SOOOOOOO good :-) So good that Jake would be cracking up at the sight of me shaking my hand in the air.
Oh yeah...and I have lots of leftovers...
I just consumed my own home-made cannelloni pasta filled with my own home-made Bolognese sauce and smothered in my own home-made beciamela sauce.
Now I have to say, before I continue, that most folks outside of Italy don't quite get what Bolognese sauce is supposed to be. Here in America, particularly, "Bolognese" typically refers to tomato sauce with meat, like ground beef. True Bolognese sauce, as I discovered in Italy, is still a meat sauce. Except it's a sauce made almost entirely of meat. I took veal, pork, pancetta (that's Italian style bacon), and a soffritto of onion, carrots, celery, and garlic, and I cooked it all for about four hours. This resulted in a tasty, fine-grained ground meat sauce that formed the filling to my cannelloni.
The cannelloni itself, for the unfamiliar, are pasta tubes. The dish with the same name is essentially a meat-filled version of manicotti. Now I actually made the pasta from scratch as well. It's super easy, super cheap, and ever since my first home-made pasta experience, it's difficult to buy the dried stuff at the grocery store.
Finally, I made a home-made besciamella sauce which is the Italian version of the French "mother sauce" called a bechamel. This sauce follows a nice 5-4-3-2-1 ingredients list: 5 tablespoons of butter, 4 tablespoons of flour, 3 cups of milk, 2 teaspoons of salt, and 1 healthy pinch of freshly ground nutmeg. While I heated the milk in one pot, I created a roux with the butter and flour. After cooking out the raw flour flavor, I added the simmering milk a little at a time to the roux and kept heating until the sauce was a nice thick consistency. I finished it up with the salt and nutmeg.
I piped the Bolognese onto blanched squares of my fresh pasta and rolled them up, placing each one onto a thin bed of tomato sauce in a baking dish. I covered everything with the besciamella and baked it in the oven for the better part of an hour.
Okay, after all that build up...it is SOOOOOOO good :-) So good that Jake would be cracking up at the sight of me shaking my hand in the air.
Oh yeah...and I have lots of leftovers...