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The Story
This week’s pasta, with its paired sauce, is one big celebration of honouring your ingredients, and enjoying the histories of the dishes that you cook. With a hint of the unconventional and a touch of cultural fusion!
A few weeks ago we made some tasty four cheese fagottini in beef bone broth. Whilst those little chaps owe their shape to Turkish manti, this week’s meaty sacchettoni filling takes its inspiration from them. In fact we swapped traditional fillings between the two, stuffing the fagottini with cheese and the sacchettoni with meat. What’s more, the filling is made from the very meat scraps salvaged in cooking up the fagottini’s accompanying bone broth! So satisfying.
To the filling, we also added roasted capsicums, stirring the leftover juices through a paired garlic and yoghurt sauce, in a nod to their Turkish manti origins and to complete our little cycle of produce and culinary crossover. For the finishing touch: activated charcoal! You might remember us playing around with food powders in our red dragonfruit tortelli. Well, we couldn’t resist adding in an artistic flourish by mixing activated charcoal into the dough, giving us a punchy contrast against the white yoghurt sauce. A touch of whole wheat flour also gives it some interesting speckling.
Finally, to serve, an homage to their dumpling origins: a light and simple yoghurt sauce, roasted capsicum-infused olive oil, and a touch of sumac. Are they pasta? Are they dumplings? Why not both? Whatever you want to call it, this is one different and delicious dish.
The Pasta
I don’t normally turn straight to the food processor for pasta unless I’m in a desperate hurry, but if you want added colour to be a feature of your dough, it will make your life much easier than kneading by hand. This is particularly true for coarser ingredients like spinach, but will also help with combining finer powders like charcoal. Or you can at least tell yourself that as you dump everything into the processor and feel guilty about not doing it by hand.
Once your dough’s combined, still give it 10 minutes of kneading by hand, if for no other reason than to inject a bit of love into the process. Also, it will help strengthen the gluten bonds. Let it rest covered and away from direct sunlight and heat for 30 minutes.
To make the filling, roast those capsicums until they start to char, making sure that you retain all of the oil and liquid that drains out of them.
In the meantime, caramelise the onions slowly with the chilli, using a bit of water here and there to help them along, and then splash in the balsamic vinegar towards the end. And look, you’ve got the food processor out… So to combine it all, throw all of your filling components unceremoniously into the processor and blitz them into a smooth paste.
Now back to the dough. As always, pass it through the pasta roller on the thickest setting a few times, folding over itself in between each pass. Step it incrementally through to a thickness of 6. Remember that throughout the rolling and cutting process, it’s best to keep the dough that you’re not working on sealed up in the airtight container that you rested it in.
For our sacchettoni, we cut big old squares of about 95-100mm. It might sound huge, but it’ll give you a nice dumpling size that’s not too fiddly to seal up. And if you want to speed things along a bit cutting those squares, hunt around for a kitchen item that fits the specs – we just used a plastic storage container! It even gave us artistically rounded corners.
Roll the filling into little grape sized balls and place one into the centre of each square, then gather the edges together so that the filling forms a ball and the outer edges ruffle above it. It should look like a small money bag.
Ensure that no air is trapped inside, and that the filling doesn’t squeeze out as you apply pressure around the centre to seal.
Play around and get creative with the process. They’ll form into their own interesting and unique little shapes. Then spend a bit of time basking in your artistic glory, before transferring them to a baking paper lined tray. Refrigerate, and cook within a day of preparation.
The Sauce
The sauce to go with these little things is suitably simple. Just stir your crushed garlic through the yoghurt, seasoning to taste with salt and pepper, and then spoon it onto the plate in small mounds. Use the back of the spoon to form a hollow in each dollop, and into these drizzle about a quarter of a teaspoon of the liquid retained from cooking the capsicums. Nestle the sacchettoni on top, and sprinkle the dish with sumac to finish.
I love a bit of mindfulness in the kitchen, and that starts with thinking about and honouring your ingredients. Sure, this isn’t a standard dish of pasta, but it’s not controversial for the sake of it either. It uses meat left over from bone broth, made from bones left over from a ragu. And it explores the origins, evolution, and geographic drift of a humble little dumpling turned pasta.
As always, we sincerely hope that our blog inspires you to get into the kitchen, and to truly enjoy and be present in the process of cooking. We celebrate every time someone messages us to say that we’ve motivated them to cook something, get the kids involved, or even show their nonna our blog (particularly when it’s met with nonna’s approval). If even the tiniest bit of our enthusiasm and passion spills over, we will have achieved what we set out to do.
Grazie mille, and buon appetito!
– Al & Al.
Equipment
- Pasta roller and cutter (if not using a rolling pin and knife)
- Air tight container for resting
- Food processor
Ingredients
Dough
- 150 g 00 flour
- 50 g wholewheat flour
- 2 eggs
- 2 tsp oil
- 1 1/2 tsp activated charcoal
Filling
- 200 g slow-cooked beef or lamb retained from our pressure cooker bone broth (alternatively, substitute with 200g of beef or lamb mince, fried in olive oil and seasoned with salt)
- 1 onion
- 2+1 tbsp olive oil extra virgin
- 4 mini capsicums
- splash of balsamic vinegar
- 1/2 tsp chilli flakes
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 4-5 sprigs parsley
Sauce
- 200 g plain greek yoghurt
- 1 clove garlic minced
- salt and pepper to season
- 1 tbsp roasted capsicum infused extra virgin olive oil retained from filling preparation
- 1 tsp sumac
Instructions
- Begin by blitzing all of the dough ingredients in a food processor for about 1 minute, or until the dough begins to hold together as one mass. Using a food processor ensures that the charcoal colour is maximised, but this step can also be completed by hand.
- On a lightly floured surface, knead the dough by hand for 10 minutes. If it sticks to your hands or the kneading surface, add flour at a rate of no more than 1 tablespoon at a time, and combine thoroughly.
- Transfer to an airtight container and rest for 30 minutes, out of direct sunlight and heat.
- To prepare the filling, slice the onion and add into a cold pan with 2 tablespoons of olive oil, and the chilli flakes. Bring up to low-medium heat, and cook gently for 30-40 minutes until they begin to caramelise. To assist the process, add 1/4 cup of water part way through, and allow it to reduce back down.
- Once the onions are soft and translucent, add a dash of balsamic vinegar, and cook for a further 5 minutes, stirring. Remove from the heat and set aside.
- Next, toss the capsicums in 1 tablespoon of olive oil, and roast in a 200 degree Celsius oven for 20 minutes, or until they start to char. Remove from oven, setting aside the capsicums and retaining the leftover oil.
- Once the capsicums have cooled enough to handle, break them open and drain the water that will have accumulated into the retained oil. Set this liquid aside for plating.
- Using a food processor, blend the meat, capsicums, caramelised onion, and parsley into a rough paste. Load this into a piping bag with a medium round tip to prepare for filling the pasta. Alternatively, you can use a teaspoon.
- Returning to the dough, cut it in half and seal the half not currently being worked on back in the airtight container.
- Using a pasta machine, roll the dough through on the thickest setting 2-3 times, folding over itself in between passes. Then step up incrementally to a thickness of 6.
- Use a rolling pasta cutter or knife to cut squares of about 95-100mm. Collect the offcuts and store in the airtight container. These can later be recombined by kneading together and repeating the previous step.
- Roll the filling into little grape sized balls and place one into the centre of each square. To shape the pasta, gather the edges together so that the filling forms a ball and the outer edges ruffle above it. It should look like a small money bag. Ensure that no air is trapped inside, and that the filling does not squeeze out as you apply pressure around the centre to seal.
- Transfer to baking paper lined trays, and refrigerate uncovered for up to a day. Alternatively, freeze in an airtight container.
- To prepare the sauce, stir the garlic through the yoghurt and season to taste with salt and pepper.
- Plate the dish by dolloping the yoghurt sauce on to the plate, creating hollows with the back of the spoon. Use a teaspoon to fill with the infused oil. Arrange the sacchettoni on top, sprinkle with sumac, and serve.
Delicious flavours, and the black frills are so swanky!
Thank you, so glad that you enjoyed it 🙂