David Uygur rolls pasta in preparation for making agnolotti dal plin. (Photo by Rich Vana)
The green and red can with the smiling face of a mustachioed chef comes to the mind of many upon the mention of ravioli; the product that generations associated with stuffed pasta with the name Chef Boyardee written across the top.
“You know that was a real person, right?” David Uygur asks when the name is referenced.
Indeed, the chef in question, Ettore Boiardi, was in the 1920’s the owner and chef of an Italian restaurant in Cleveland whose entrepreneurial spirit and penchant for pasta eventually led to the widespread popularity of the Chef Boyardee (so spelled to help with American’s attempts to pronounce the name) products that are ubiquitous in supermarkets today.
But there’s far more to stuffed pasta than what can be found in the can, and to find out all about it, we asked Uygur, the chef, co-owner of Lucia in the Bishop Arts, to explain his approach on agnoletti, tortelli, and yes, even ravioli, and what surprises these stuffed, shaped Italian dumplings can hold. What’s even better – he even gives us a demonstration and a recipe.
Thanks for chatting with us, David. So many people likely think of ravioli when they think of a stuffed pasta, but that’s really only the beginning of the list – how many different types of stuffed pastas are really out there?
Honestly, I couldn’t tell you. As far as format goes, you have stuff like ravioli, where you boil it, and then you have stuff like cannelloni or manicotti, where the pasta is rolled around something and then baked, but different specific types? There are too many to name. 
The thing is, pasta means paste. It’s not all that complicated – you can bake it or you can boil it, and then the shapes of pasta in general have been named after anything, really – after a battles or horses’ teeth or ox horns or angel hair. As far as stuffed pastas go, agnolotti is one that we do a lot here. Agnoletti dal plin, specifically, is pinched ravioli; that’s the kind we’re making. Traditionally it’s pretty small – on par with tortellini.
So the shapes are arbitrary? There’s no practical reason for them?
I’m not sure how practical the shapes are, or how practicality was considered when they were first being made – it probably has more to do with shapes to commemorate an event or even just, ‘Hey, doesn’t that look like a horse’s tooth?’
With that said, practically speaking, the shape of the agnolotti dal plin is one that I particularly like. Take ravioli, where you have a sheet on top of a sheet, essentially. It’s smooth – like a flying saucer. With the plin you have the pinch that gives you tiny little cups on either end that help to hold on to the sauce, which I think is nice. Also, with small pastas you have to produce a lot more of them to make a dish, and this is pretty user friendly; if you’re going to make pasta, this is one that I’d recommend. Ravioli is neat, but again, this is one that I particularly like.
Okay, cups to hold the sauce are good. But what kind of sauce would you typically be looking for with a ravioli?
The sauce obviously has to match the filling – the small pastas it’s nice to have something that’s a little brothy; tortellini, for example, is typically served in brodo – in a broth. The idea is to have the filling be strongly flavored enough to where the dressing is kind of simple – not bland, by any stretch, but simple. It’s nice enough to dress a good-flavored, filled pasta with butter and grated parm – that’s pretty tasty. Really, you just want it to balance.
And when you say strongly flavored fillings, are there traditional fillings or can you just throw whatever you like in there?
There are traditional fillings – spinach and ricotta stuffings are made all over, and they have things like tortelli di zucca (pumpkin stuffed, tortellini-shaped pasta) – and there are regional ones where they say, ‘You make that with this, and that’s it,’ as well.
But filled pasta is, in a lot of ways, a cuisine of frugality. Take a leftover roast. Yesterday you had a roast. Today you don’t have enough leftover roast to make a meal, so you take it, chop it up, and stuff it in pasta. The important thing to remember is the texture: no matter what you’re filling is, it needs to not be wet. If there’s lots of water in it, it will ruin the integrity of the pasta, depending on how bad it is. It just won’t work. That’s what makes ricotta such a great medium – if you work it enough and drain it enough. So if you’re using something like spinach, you do have to really squeeze it to ensure you’ve got all the possible moisture out.
Also, you need to do what you can to ensure there aren’t any air bubbles. A little one here and there probably won’t do any harm, but air bubbles can make your pasta explode. It helps to let it sit in the refrigerator for a little while – if you’ve got air in there, you might lose a little of the bubble depending on how big it is.
What about the pasta itself? Is it the same pasta you use to make things like spaghetti and other non-filled pastas?
No. In fact, this dough (holds up a wrapped ball of dough) for the spaghetti has water in it. This dough (holds it in the other hand) is eggs and soft wheat flour only, and it has a little more resiliency – if I left it as thick as I leave the spaghetti, it would be tough. And with stuffed pasta, you don’t want a crunch to the dough. So we don’t laminate our dough – which means we don’t fold it over on itself – we just roll it out until it becomes the right thickness, whereas if I were making spaghetti, I’d probably fold it a few times.
What about an element of surprise with filled pastas? Is that an aspect you ever try to play up?
There’s sometimes an element of surprise – there’s one that we do that was invented in the 19th century at some hotel in Torino – it’s a raviolone, the -one suffix meaning big – and the way we do it is to roll out two sheets of dough, and then with your filling, ricotta or spinach or something like that, you pipe a ring, take a whole egg yolk and place it in there and wrap it up with the pasta. Then, if you cook it properly, when you poke it with a fork the egg yolk will run out. That’s a pretty cool one.
That sounds labor intensive.
Yeah, but it’s also big, so it’s not like you need to make a thousand of them.
But for regular filled pastas that aren’t filled with surprises, your raviolis and whatnot, those are something that are pretty easy to do at home?
Well, yeah. You’re probably not going to want to make them every night, but there’s no reason people can’t do this in their own kitchen.
Do you have a recipe they could try?
Sure.
Links for David’s demonstration on filling and shaping agnolotti, as well as his pasta recipe for stuffed pastas.