Tortellini with Carrot Filling

Yes, I know, that’s not what tortellini look like. More on that in a minute.

I had two sources of inspiration for today’s meal. The first came courtesy of a friend who posted on Facebook about the pizzas he’d served yesterday. I did rather fancy pizza. But what won out was a programme by Makłowicz that I watched yesterday on some exotic channel called TVP Rozrywka (I’d had no idea such a thing existed). Makłowicz went to Bologna, where I saw this odd Italian bloke (turns out they’re not all handsome over there 😉 turning out tortellini like a machine. By which I mean he was folding them at the firing rate of a Kalashnikov. Incredible.

All right, but I’m no Italian. So what if that Italian Kalashnikov and I have at least one of the aforementioned qualities in common, when even my Polish pierogi tend to be distinctly average (well, they were the one time I made them, which rather put me off)?

I think sheer contrariness won the day. If that Italian could do it, why couldn’t I? Besides, they said on the programme that the dough was a piece of cake. Eggs and flour. And that’s why these are tortellini and not pierogi. The dough for Polish pierogi is quite different, after all. So however little they look like tortellini, it was the dough that clinched it for me. Tortellini they are.

Right, I’ve got eggs, I’ve got flour. But what do I put inside these little parcels? As usual at my place, inspiration gets a helping hand from whatever’s in the fridge. Especially on a day like today when most of the shops are closed. I found a decent number of carrots, which were at least the same colour as the pumpkin filling that not-so-handsome (sic!) Italian was stuffing his pasta with. And that’s where the improvising began.

I have to say it turned out pretty well. The parcels aren’t perfect, obviously. I freely admit that pinching dough together isn’t my strong suit. Definitely not. Besides, when you make pierogi (or tortellini or whatever it is you’re folding), it’s the folding and sealing that’s torture. The dough’s a doddle. The filling’s a doddle. The folding…

Know what the worst part is? Those first few, maybe the first dozen. The pile of filling doesn’t seem to shrink at all, and your hands feel like they’ve just chopped down half of Białowieża Forest. It does get a bit easier, though in my case I noticed that each parcel was bigger than the one before 🙂 Still, I’m pleased to say they turned out a lot better than my first attempt at Polish meat pierogi. What’s more, I ended up with over 50 tortellini, all different sizes, of course, and for the first time in my life 2/3 of the batch went into the freezer. Good luck with the folding.

At a glance:

Preparation time: oh, a good 1.5 hours

Serves: 55 pasta parcels of assorted sizes, so enough for several people

How many calories? I’ll keep repeating my mantra: Italians are handsome, they’re slim, and apparently they eat these

Ingredients for my version of tortellini:

• 5 hen’s eggs
• half a kilo of flour

For the filling:

• 8 small carrots
• 1 large onion
• 1 medium red onion
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 3 teaspoons of sugar
• two teaspoons of ground black pepper
• half a teaspoon of salt
• olive oil
• 4 small triangles of creamy processed cheese 

Method (fold, seal, repeat):

Carrot and onion filling:

I started with the filling, as it needs to cool once it’s cooked. So I peeled all the carrots and onions. I chopped the onions very finely and grated the carrots on the fine side of a grater. I heated olive oil in a frying pan and fried the onions with the garlic (also finely chopped), adding 3 teaspoons of sugar. Once the onions were nicely translucent, I added the grated carrots, then the pepper and salt. I fried everything for a few minutes, stirring almost constantly. Then I added the 4 little cheese triangles and a little water. I turned down the “heat” (from 6 to 4 on my scale of 1–10). I cooked it for another ten or fifteen minutes, stirring now and then. You’re looking for a fairly firm, sticky filling. Once the water had evaporated and the cheese was worked through the whole mixture, I transferred it to a bowl and set it aside to cool.

Pasta dough for the tortellini:

I put about 400 grams of flour in a deep bowl and cracked in 5 hen’s eggs. I mixed everything with a big spoon. Once the eggs and flour came together I started kneading by hand. You need to add a little flour at first because the dough is really sticky. Once it was springy and smooth, I moved it to the worktop, dusted it with flour again and kneaded it, pressing it firmly against the worktop. When it was no longer too sticky (I didn’t use more than half a kilo of flour in all, and more would probably spoil the dough), I tore off a piece and rolled it out into a very thin sheet with my little rolling pin.

Shaping the tortellini:

Once I had a thin sheet on the worktop (keep dusting it with flour), I cut it with a knife into fairly even squares. That’s important: I find a square is the easiest shape to fold around the filling. I took each square in my left hand, stretched it a little more to get the dough as thin as possible and spooned some filling right into the middle with a teaspoon. Just enough so I could still seal it. Here’s how I did that. I brought two opposite corners together, the top and bottom ones. Then I pinched the edges shut from left to right, going over the tip I’d already joined. Next I folded the two side corners in so they met and tucked the tip underneath them. That brought all the corners together in one place. I know tortellini don’t look like that (more like Chinese dumplings, really), but it works, and that’s what matters.

The finished tortellini can be frozen. I laid mine out uncooked on one of the freezer shelves. Once they’re frozen I’ll transfer them to a bag. I cooked the rest like any pasta: I dropped them into boiling salted water, waited for them to rise to the surface and cooked them for 3–4 minutes. And that was that. I ate mine on their own because I had no energy left to make anything else, but you can serve them with sauce, add them to a salad, and so on. Enjoy!