As a child, I had no appetite and only liked certain foods. Mom worked out of town, so making me eat was the difficult task of Mariella, a young girl from Bellegra.
She discovered that I didn’t have total disdain for tortellini with cream, the ones made in the 80s: cooking cream, boiled frozen peas, and pieces of cooked ham.
It was my daily lunch for at least two years, until I “freed” myself from home-made lunches and cream tortellini by going to school full time. Since then, many years have passed, and I can no longer eat them—or even go near cooking cream which I hate!
During lockdown, I place several orders from a good chef from Savigno who reintroduced me to this wonder. They are made without cooking cream, without peas, and without ham, but they’re seasoned with a heavenly double cream and parmesan sauce. The sauce servings are obviously down to my speculation.
Tortellini with cream
- Preparation time: 5 hours
- Ingredients for 4-6 servings
- Difficulty: Difficult recipe
- Ingredients
- For the tortellini:
- 200 g of all-purpose flour
- 2 eggs
- For the tortellini filling:
- 100g of pork loin
- 100g of prosciutto
- 100g of mortadella
- 100g of grated Parmigiano Reggiano
- 1 egg
- Nutmeg to taste
- Salt to taste
- For the sauce:
- 8 tablespoons of grated Parmigiano Reggiano
- 280 g of double cream
- 20 g of butter
- Salt and pepper to taste
- Instructions
- Prepare the filling.
- In a small pan with very little oil, cook the diced loin until it develops a light color on all sides, without letting all the juices escape. Let it cool.
- Cut the mortadella and ham into strips.
- Pass the prosciutto, mortadella, and cooked loin through a meat grinder. Add the grated parmesan and the egg, season with salt and nutmeg, and mix until the mixture is smooth.
- Make the pasta. Place the flour on the pastry board, creating a hole in the center where you can pour in the eggs. Knead until the mixture is smooth. Cover with cellophane and leave to rest at room temperature for an hour.
- Use the sheeter to roll out the dough very thinly.
- Cut squares measuring 3.5 cm on each side (tortellini in broth are traditionally 3 cm on each side).
- Arrange small piles of filling in each square.
- First, close the tortellini in a triangle, joining the two opposite corners. Then, rotate the other two corners around the finger, thus forming a kind of ring.
- In a pan, boil the water for the pasta. Salt the cooking water and cook the tortellini for two minutes.
Meanwhile, put the cream and butter in a large pan and let the liquid heat up. Add the grated parmesan and tortellini. - Cook on a very low heat for a couple of minutes, until the cream is absorbed by the tortellini.
Tips to ensure the success of the dish:
- The portion of tortellini per person, when served dry, is approximately 200 g per person. When in broth, it’s usually 100 g per person.
- I recommend that, to cook pasta in an ideal way, you need to consider 1 liter of water for every 100 g of pasta.
