BALANZONI: A BOLOGNESE PASTA
+ how to make bright green pasta at home with your eyes closed.
Good morning!
Happy Friday and welcome back to How I Cook+.
This week, we’re making pasta. Come and dive into the world of balanzoni, a charming, chubby, bright green tortelloni. We’ll make a simple spinach pasta dough and stuff it with bolognese classics like mortadella, ricotta and parmesan. It really is as good as it sounds, and remarkably easy. There’s always a few hurdles to jump when making pasta at home, so I’ll give you a hand with those too. If it’s your first rodeo, this is a great place to start! Get stuck in.
After more homemade pasta? Why not check out the recipe index for plenty more. We’ve got Ricotta Ravioli with Pesto & Courgettes, a handful of ten minute pastas as well as Homemade Gnocchi and of course, the Sunday Sauce series.
Oh and don’t forget, there’s also a whole chapter on cooking pastas and grains in my upcoming cookbook, pre-order a copy now! I’m excited to share more and more from the book over the coming weeks, so stay tuned!
Following the recipe we’ve got the beautiful new record from Perfume Genius and an excellent good collection of short stories from Amor Towles.
Thanks for reading,
B x
BOLOGNA
It’s been over two years since Lou and I landed in Bologna and I look back fondly on it as a trip that fell pretty soon after we’d really cracked the concept of the “city break”. A good CB is allowing yourself a 72 hour window to squash in as much of a city as you can, whilst maintaining the illusion that you’re actually on holiday and are in fact extremely relaxed. As you can imagine, we’re pretty food-focused when on holiday (who isn’t?) so it is also about scarfing down as much local fare as humanly possible.
Bologna felt like the first time we really nailed it. It’s a pocket-sized city really, at once extremely walkable and very beautiful. You can stroll from bar to restaurant to museum, sheltered from the sun by miles of covered walkways or porticoes line the streets, in fact, no other city boasts as many as Bologna. They give the city an old-world drama that is largely lost to the cursed, high-street laden major European city. Porticoes and nostalgia aside, what people really come here for is the food.
It’s all rich, rich, rich here. Big bowls of ragu, lasagne, tortellini in brodo, egg-rich pastas and clouds of parmesan gracing every table. Don’t miss a big platter of thinly sliced mortadella with your spritz and you’d be mad not to try a Cotoletta alla Bolognese, a breaded veal cutlet crowned with prosciutto and bechamel. Gilding the lily? Absolutely. Bologna, an eater’s paradise, so naturally, I was like a pig in s**t.
BALANZONI
A short ride from the airport and one airbnb check-in later, we set out for our first bite. We had our sights set on pasta but we’d arrived in the inconvenient culinary nether-zone between lunch and dinner that certain places live and die by, and everywhere was shuttered for a well earned rest before the onslaught of evening diners.
A small pasta stand in a suspiciously touristy looking market was however still pumping out pasta, so a beeline was made. I should have left my suspicions at the door. Stunning tortellini and ravioli being made right before our eyes. Pans of tagliatelle al ragu being tossed and tossed, fistfuls of parmesan raining down on paper plates packed with buttery glazed noodles. A sight to behold.
The thing is, some places you visit, the bar is just that little bit higher. The bottom line for food is so good in Bologna that it feels like you can’t miss. I say it often about Australia. Visit Melbourne or Sydney and it’s very hard to have a bad meal. You’ll have similar experience in CDMX on the quest for a good taco.
I ordered a plate of balanzoni with crushed hazelnuts and sage butter. I didn’t have a clue what they were and was delighted when I realised they were stuffed with mortadella. Buried under an avalanche of parmesan and served with a sunset orange spritz, balanzoni have officially entered the chat. Unbelievable.
So after that first brush with the little green pasta, I was hooked. We didn’t meet again on that trip, there was just too much to try, but the memory was firmly lodged in my head. “I’ll make you one day” I thought, and would you look at that, here we are.
In their simplest form, balanzoni are a large tortelloni, made with a spinach dough and stuffed with a blend of ricotta and mortadella. Sometimes seasoned with nutmeg or extra parmesan. As is often the case with Italian cooking, they’re very simple, but you’ll find the devil all in the detail.
SPINACH DOUGH
It’s pretty, isn’t it?! A mesmerising thing to make, a green pasta dough is a teeny level up in difficulty from the classic yolk-rich pasta dough we’ve covered on the newsletter before. An extra step in the process is what ups the complexity a little. Don’t panic, it’s still very easy. Adding more ingredients to a pasta dough will have an impact on the hydration percentage.
What do I mean by that? In short, the amount of wet stuff you need to add to the dry stuff to make a well balanced dough. If you’re adding a dry product like a different kind of flour or semolina to your dough recipe, then you need to increase the hydration, be it water or egg, that you’re adding to maintain balance. If it’s something liquid or wet like squid ink or spinach, then you need to make sure there’s enough dry ingredients to maintain the goldilocks ratio for good pasta dough. Spinach has a staggeringly high water content and simply blending it into eggs raw would really throw off our balance. We need to blanch it and remove as much water as we can before we can make dough.
BLANCHING & BLENDING
Ordinarily, when blanching veggies I ask you to refresh with ice water to stop the cooking. As we’re blending the living daylights out of this spinach and we want it as dry as possible, we’re not icing this time. The steam flying off of your cooked spinach is water leaving town, and that’s good. Let the steam do its thing and then use a clean tea towel to wring out as much water as you can. Once you’ve got a bone dry ball of cooked greens, you can go ahead and blend it with your eggs.
I like to blend the mixture until it’s very smooth and you can’t distinguish any fleck of spinach through the egg. You can make it as coarse or as smooth as you like, the coarser you leave the spinach, the more of a “camouflage” affect your pasta will have. Be sure not to blend for too long, if you let the blender run and run, the friction will heat the eggs and might end up cooking them. green scrambled eggs isn’t what you’re looking for, so keep an eye on it.
MIXING THE DOUGH
There are a few ways to skin this cat. I mixed this the old fashioned way, the ol’ volcano of flour and a fork technique. You can also bring the flour and spinach mixture together in a food processor or using the paddle attachment on a stand mixer. To be honest, I find it doesn’t make a huge difference. Pasta evangelists will likely baulk at this claim, but we’re in the business of good home cooking and sometimes a short cut is the right route to take. Once you’ve combined the two, it’s time knead, and you can only do this by hand. You’ll be done in 10-12 minutes, so don’t get lazy on me now.
When you’re combing the dough, stick with it. It’ll look shaggy and weird for a while, then feel like it’s never going to come together. Keep on kneading, don’t add any extra egg or flour, you’ve got this dialled in remember? We weighed everything out and it will work. Trust me.
SHAPING & STORAGE
This is the tricky bit, but once you’ve got the first 5 down, and those first 5 will probably look a bit shit, your balanzoni will begin to take shape. There are no hard and fast rules as far as size goes, but you want these to feel plump and generous. I like to describe them as “chubby”. Check out the recipe below for detailed shaping instructions but honestly, don’t sweat it if they don’t come out perfect. at the end of the day, they taste just as good looking like Frankenstein’s balanzoni as they do looking like bologna’s favourite Nonna made them.
I like to eat these pretty soon after I’ve shaped them. This is a wetter dough than we’ve worked with before, so you’ll need to allow these to air dry for at least 15 minutes or so before cooking. This way they’ll hold their shape once cooked and you’ll garner more of a bite. This recipe does make quite a lot of pasta, so you’ll likely have leftovers. Bring a big pot of water to a boil and blanch the pasta for one minute before plunging into ice water. This will set the pasta and allow you to chill or freeze the balanzoni for another day.
THE SAUCE
Keep it simple, stupid! I served my balanzoni with cream, hazelnuts and a little sage. This is about as complex a sauce as I’d suggest with this pasta. Would they be nice tossed through a ragu? Yes, naturally. I’d hesitate to do so though, as you’ll lose that rich, creamy mortadella and the perfume of the nutmeg. When a pasta is this standalone delicious, do as little as you can to make it sing. Honestly, a little sage butter would do the trick.
A FEW COMMON PASTA HURDLES TO JUMP
When rolling, don’t add too much flour to your pasta dough. If you work in too much flour, it will leave streaks across your dough and will dry everything out.
Work quickly but carefully when rolling and move with confidence, pasta can smell your fear!
When shaping pasta, always keep sheets you’re not using covered loosely with cling film or a damp tea towel.
Any pasta sheets that have become too dry to shape, spritz with a little water.
Make sure your filling isn’t too wet or it’ll soak your pasta as it dries. If you think the ricotta is too wet, hang it in a sieve set over a bowl for 10-15 minutes before using.
If saving pasta for another day, blanch briefly in boiling water and refresh before chilling or freezing.
BALANZONI WITH HAZELNUTS & CREAM
This will make enough pasta for 8-10 people see above for notes on leftovers or scale as needed.
INGREDIENTS
For the spinach pasta dough
220g Washed Fresh Spinach
180g Whole Egg (about 3 large eggs)