How to Make Italian Comfort Food Like Cheesy Stuffed Shells and Eggplant Pecorino

cook's country julia and bridget make a streamlined recipe for cheesy stuffed shells adam reveals his top pick for broiler safe baking dishes and brian makes julia the perfect eggplant pecorino that's all right here on cook's country today every supermarket has an aisle dedicated to pasta but before the late 1700s fasta was not universally known here in the us after enjoying pasta on a visit to paris in the 1780s president thomas jefferson returned with cases of noodles and eventually he had a pasta machine shipped to his home monticello he began serving pasta which at the time was known as macaroni at all of his famous dinner parties and soon pasta became fashionable now the 19th century brought large groups of italian immigrants to america and with them the pasta varieties that were specific to their regions you had ziti from sicily fettuccine from tuscany and from campania conquire or seashells today we're making big cheesy stuffed shells so let's head into the kitchen now i love to eat stuffed shells but i don't like to make them because there's so many components besides the sauce you have the shells themselves you boil them until they're super fragile and then you've got to fill them with a cheese mixture it sounds good once it's all together but in practice it's pretty messy so i like to call in a friend like julia who's going to make them for us that's right now on the other end of the spectrum i found really simple stuff shells recipes so simple you didn't stuff the shells at all you boiled them and then you kind of stirred in all the ingredients you would have stuffed them with and put them in the oven it's called unstuffed shells quite clever but not what we were after we wanted the traditional style but we wanted it to be easier so we're going to start with our homemade tomato sauce which comes together in a snap here i have two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil and i'm heating it up in this saucepan over medium heat and you can see it's just beginning to shimmer i'm going to add one chopped onion which is about a cup of chopped onion i'm also going to add half a teaspoon of salt and a half a teaspoon of pepper i'm just going to let this cook for about 10 minutes or so until the onions are softened and lightly browned while this cooks away let's come down here and talk about the filling now traditional fillings are always based around ricotta and we're not going to change that here we have 10 ounces of whole milk ricotta we're going to add a few more cheeses just to add some texture and flavor so first cheese up four ounces of shredded fontina cheese i'm going to add two ounces of grated pecorino romano cheese i'm also going to add two eggs to the filling and the eggs really work as a binder to help that filling stay cohesive as it cooks and it also makes the shells easier to fill some fresh chopped bases good stuff not dried basil and this is three tablespoons fresh garlic and i'm just have two cloves i'm going to press it right into the bowl i love using a garlic press i know you're a presser i am because it just makes it so easy and it crushes the garlic nicely so you get all the flavor i'm also going to add a little bit of dried oregano this is a teaspoon now i'm going to add a half a teaspoon of table salt and last but not least this is an unusual ingredient this is corn starch a tablespoon and a half of corn starch it helps absorb any liquid that comes out of the filling during cooking but it also helps make that filling be nice and silky all right so we're just going to stir this all together until it's nice and evenly combined all right that looks pretty good so now i'm going to put this into a disposable piping bag that's just going to make it really easy to stuff the shells later on now if you didn't have one of these you could use a large zipper lock bag in much the same way and i haven't cut the tip yet all right so we're just going to set this aside until we need it later now back here at our onions so you can take a look at these onions and they're nice and soft and lightly browned that's going to deliver a lot of flavor to our otherwise fairly simple sauce next ingredient in is garlic more garlic this is six cloves and again i'm just going to use the garlic press to squeeze them right into the pot all right so that's six cloves of garlic in addition to the garlic we're gonna add a little bit of heat this is a quarter of a teaspoon of red pepper flakes we're just gonna let the garlic and pepper flakes cook for about 30 seconds until it's nice and fragrant next up this is a big 28 ounce can of tomato puree which we like because it has a very smooth texture now surprise for you we're gonna add water a lot of water this is two cups of water and i know it doesn't make sense now because i'm making a very watery sauce but i'm making it watery on purpose and last but not least just a teaspoon of sugar to take the edge off those tomatoes we'll just bring this up to a simmer and then turn the heat down to medium-low and let it cook for about five minutes until all of those flavors melt this sauce has been cooking for five minutes you can see it's a little on the loose side that's because i added the water and the reason i added the water is because we didn't pre-cook these shells they're still hard right out of the package that makes them easier to fill and they're going to cook through in the oven this is 25 shells and you can get this amount of shells out of one 12-ounce box but when you open the box you want to go through them and look for shells that are nice and opened that means it's going to be easy to fill you want to discard or save for another use any of these that are enclosed gotcha all right so 25 shells we have the filling and a pastry bag i'm just going to cut off the tip of the bag so i'm just going to fill them up partially leave a lot of room on top so i can go back and add more filling as i have it all right got this last little bit of filling yeah there we go 25 perfectly filled shells so now it's time to build the casserole dish i'm just going to take a cup of this sauce and put it right into the bottom of the dish get things started we'll spread this out nice and evenly so this is a 13 by 9 inch casserole dish and now we're going to start to layer the stuffed shells in the dish i want you to notice i'm putting these shells in the dish open side facing up that's because we put it seam side down all the filling leaked out and then it's not a stuffed shell all right so i'm going to gently pour the rest of this sauce right over the top of all the shells being careful to make sure it evenly gets over every shell because again that pasta is not cooked so it all has to be covered with sauce so that it turns soft in the oven all right now we're going to cover it with foil because we want to trap the steam in the dish to help cook that pasta through we're going to put this dish on a rimmed baking sheet it's going to go into a hot oven 400 degrees for 45 minutes [Music] to help you out there thank you all right so you're ready to peek under the foil sharia oh you can see it's still bubbling right there around the edges here i have eight ounces of shredded fontina it's going to melt over the top and look gorgeous and melty and a little bit browned that's starting to look better don't you think yeah already so this is going to go back into the oven same oven middle rack 400 degrees for another 15 minutes until that fontina has melted and begun to get a little brown okay oh that looks more like it right that's better isn't it uh yes oh goodness what an improvement we have to let this cool obviously for a little bit about 25 minutes and then we can dig in sounds good these shells have been cooling for 25 minutes so it's time to eat all right i'm just gonna sprinkle it with a little more basil this is just a tablespoon of chopped fresh basil a little freshness all right now how many shells would you like i will start with two shells please i'm gonna give you the corner yes a middle shell yeah all right cheers cheers oh that's good very well seasoned too and a lot of stuffed shell recipes don't season enough and you end up it's just all watery it doesn't have a lot of flavor pasta on its own doesn't have a lot of flavor this is very cheesy and delicious well i also love the doneness of the pasta because when you make it the traditional way and you boil the noodles and then you put them in the oven for a while they get really overcooked and mushy this way they're almost al dente they still have some texture and the filling is so creamy thanks to that cornstarch this is smooth it's almost buttery way to re-engineer that that is perfect oh thank you you've got to make these stuffed shells and it starts with a pretty thin sauce and meanwhile make a filling and then pipe the mixture into uncooked shells place the shells on top of some of the sauce top with more sauce and bake top with more fontina and then bake it all until browned and serve so from cook's country the actually easy cheesy stuffed shells they're good though aren't they they're really good that's homey [Music] a 13 by nine inch baking pan is a kitchen essential yet not all pans can withstand high oven temperatures or the direct heat of the broiler so adam's here today with a whole new lineup of dishes that are durable you know broiler temperatures can go up to 550 degrees that's not safe for our favorite glass pan it's not safe for our favorite nettle pan which is why you need a broiler safe 13x9 baking pan we have a lineup of seven different dishes here the prices range from about 37 dollars to about 110 dollars they were all roughly 13 by 9 inches and the capacities ranged from three to five quarts wow now in each dish testers made three dishes one of them was a yellow cake which they cut right in the dish to see if they were scratch resistant enough they also made mac and cheese which you have in front of you and a salmon dish with rice and vegetables and those two they serve right out of the dishes with metal spatulas again to see whether the dishes were going to be scratch resistant and i'll tell you the truth all of these cook the food just fine well that's good news yeah that's very good news and so the tester's preferences came down to two design factors one of them was the type of handle you can see like right here we have these little sort of tab handles there whereas something like this is a big loop handle that looks sturdy it is sturdy i want you to put on those oven mitts down there and pick up the mac and cheese in this dish with the tab handles oh that's dicey it was hot and there are people in the kitchen i would be a little nervous about that exactly now yeah there's no slip in here because you can really put your fingers through the loops and that gives you a lot of security yeah it's much more secure so testers prefer the looped handles they also talked about the capacity now testers found a range in capacity from the low end of about 12 cups to the high end of 19 and 3 8 cups that's a big difference there's a big difference and that's due in part to the height of the sides which ranged from two and a quarter inches to about three inches now the problem with the smaller ones is that it was sort of a tight fit for the salmon and vegetable recipe they had to do a little maneuvering to get it all in there also because the dish was smaller the mac and cheese sat up a little higher so when they were scattering those bread crumbs on top it was easier to scatter them around rather than in the dish and it can cause things to bubble over more easily exactly that's a problem you're gonna get your oven messy now there was also a problem with the dishes that were really big the biggest one was 19 and 3 8 cups the mac and cheese sat down kind of low and a couple of testers thought that it looked a little sad and lost i've seen that it is sadly it is you know so really they like something right in between with a capacity of about 14 to 16 cups and in the end this is the winning pan this is the mrs anderson's baking lasagna pan with handle it's got a capacity of 14 and a quarter cup so it's right in that sweet spot between the small ones and the big ones and it's 37 which was the least expensive one of the bunch i like it so there you have it our winning 13 by nine inch dish is by mrs anderson it's a baking and lasagna pan with handle and it's about 37 dollars there are many versions of eggplant parmesan and i've happily eaten my fair share but today brian has a new one to show us you know i keep on running into fantastic italian restaurants in the most unlikely places oh really it's your it's your skill it's my skill it's i didn't know i had it until it started happening over and over i was in west lake ohio which is a few minutes outside of downtown cleveland and i ended up at a little place called la compania it's a strip mall italian restaurant with no sign and as the owner carmela ferguson says if you want to find me you'll find me but i was told to go there to try specifically the eggplant parmesan okay it was i gotta tell you one of the best i've ever had and i had to rush back to the kitchen cut my trip short and came back and started working on this that's pretty high praise coming from you it was fantastic it all begins with a simple marinara so i have two tablespoons of butter melting over medium low heat add a quarter cup of finely minced onion three garlic cloves two minced ancho fillets i know a lot of people kind of shy away from anchovies but they add a lot of depth to the sauce umami is what they add three quarters of a teaspoon of table salt a quarter teaspoon of pepper flakes one quarter teaspoon of dried oregano we're just going to combine that in this melted butter i'm going to cook it until the onions just slightly softened which takes about three minutes so the onions have been cooking now for about three minutes and you smell how fragrant that is we're gonna add to that 128 ounce can of crushed tomatoes and one 14 ounce can of diced tomatoes in their juice we like the texture that the diced tomatoes added we like the body that the crushed tomatoes gave us give that a stir to combine and we're going to work in a half teaspoon of sugar as well so we're going to bring this to a simmer reduce the heat to medium-low and let it cook until it's slightly thickened and that takes about 10 minutes our sauce has been simmering now for about 10 minutes you can see it's thickened up nicely and it smells delicious delish huh all right so we shut the heat off there we're going to add one tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil and then a quarter cup of chopped fresh basil with our basil we're not going to beat it to death here we're going to give it a nice easy chop we don't need to pulverize it or chop it so finely that we can't recognize it and that's about a quarter cup just throw that in there it's really again just to enhance the eggplant i like it okay so now that that's all stirred in we're going to set this aside and turn our attention to the eggplant the thing that separates carmella's eggplant parmesan from everybody else's is how she treats the eggplant we have three 10-ounce eggplant here yeah they're on the small side yes so you want to use something between 10 and 16 ounces okay any bigger than that we're not going to be able to fit it all in our baking dish okay what she does is she slices them paper thin lengthwise okay so we're going to start off by trimming up two of those eggplants because whether we need two or three really depends on me and how perfectly i could slice or not the eggplant so we're going to begin by taking off one small edge there so we have a flat surface and then we're going for a quarter inch slicing lengthwise we'll measure the first slice and then we use that as our model throughout the rest of the process no shame in pulling a ruler out as you cook that's right we're looking for 20 slices of eggplant total now if you have a mandolin that works especially well with some of these smaller eggplants one thing we could do is we could lay the eggplant on its side holding the eggplant in place with the palm of your hand so in case there's a slip the knife only bounces off your palm you know and don't push it too far this is not going to really yield too much of an eggplant slice for us so we could just throw that in the scrap pile and we'll continue cutting with our next piece of eggplant so another little trick you could do for slicing eggplant because i don't know if you noticed they're kind of round and they have a tendency to roll around on the cutting board i noticed that you can cut a thin slice off of one side and use that as a base so we'll continue cutting this eggplant it looks like i'll dip into the third one until we get our perfect 20 slices and then we'll come back and start frying carmelo's breading technique for eggplant is different than most other recipes i've seen out there what she does is she takes this very thinly sliced eggplant she dredges it in flour dips in an egg and from the egg it goes right into hot extra virgin olive oil you're not going to get any of the muddy breading in there and it's going to be all about the eggplant there's just a cup of oil in here we're looking for 350 degrees we're heating it over medium-high heat and since it's a shallow amount of oil in the skillet we want to tilt it away from us so it pulls on one end okay we're well in the 350 and that's perfect so now we're going to take our eggplant and i like to work with about three slices at a time dredge them lightly in the flour kind of knock off the excess drop them in the egg now you haven't seasoned these eggplant at all yet this eggplant is sliced so thin that a lot of the water cooks off almost immediately and the sauce is very flavorful and we're going to add a ton of cheese to this so there's really no need to add any extra seasoning and so we're looking for about a minute and a half on each side of the eggplant we're looking for light golden brown you can really see it's just like a toasted egg look to it we want it to just cook through and be tender enough to go into the casserole and as you're cooking and you go further and further through the batch you want to monitor the temperature and occasionally check it again because even over medium heat it has a tendency to rise because remember you're taking a little bit of oil out each time when you put the eggplant on the sheet tray all right so we'll finish frying up the eggplant until we make our way through all those slices all right julia it's time to start assembling our eggplant and here's perhaps where it gets the most interesting this is the part that i really fell in love with we're going to build individual stacks of eggplant almost like whole eggplants with cheese and sauce layered in between usually when you make eggplant parmesan you shingle them in addition a single layer or sometimes in two layers like a lasagna but you're saying we're just going to make individual stacks that's right and this is the way it's served to you at the restaurant you get a whole rebuilt stack of eggplant oh i like that it's really great all right so we're going to start off by putting one cup of sauce in the bottom of the dish this is a two ounce ladle so we'll put four ladles full and we're just going to spread that around evenly and now we're going to put the eggplant in so we're taking the bigger slices of eggplant because we want to build up to a point you know we want to have the bigger slices down at the bottom so then i'm going to put the second piece of eggplant going top to tail exactly so it fits nice and easy and evenly in there on top of that we're going to do a half cup of sauce it doesn't have to be perfect there's going to be so much sauce and cheese in this thing by the time we're done you're not going to know what happened okay then the real shocker that although it's listed as eggplant parmesan on the menu at la company there's no parmesan in it really it's all pecorino cheese that is surprising apparently carmella fragassi grew up going to visit her family in puglia and all they ever used was pecorino and i gotta say i'm a convert i think it's really fantastic stuff and it works really well with this eggplant now we're going to keep on layering so another piece of eggplant another half cup of sauce another half cup of pecorino it's not shy on the cheese no that's why we didn't have to season anything all right so that is our final layer of pecorino we'll put our last layer of eggplant on top of that well now i see what you mean by putting the smaller pieces on top so you kind of build up to them almost like a little pyramid right and it's going to make slicing this and separating your own personal stack a little bit easier i like the idea of my own personal stack so now we're going to put the remaining sauce all over top of this this looks good brian yeah and it's so light it's almost like diet food so we're just going to cover this up with our remaining sauce all right now carmella does not add any more cheese it's all pecorino all the way through i couldn't help but add something that would brown nicely on top so we have one cup of fontina cheese here that we shredded and we're just going to sprinkle that over top well again fontina has more flavor than mozzarella so using pecorino instead parmesan fontina instead of mozzarella you're building in a lot more flavor this is an alternative eggplant parmesan i'm in also known as an eggplant pecorino so we're going to throw this into a 375 degree oven i've set the oven rack to the upper middle position which is about six inches from the broiler element because we're going to broil this at the end to brown this lovely fontina that we've sprinkled on top it'll take about 30 minutes just to heat the casserole all the way through it's been about 30 minutes we can take a look at our eggplant to make sure it's bubbling around the edges and hot throughout oh brian that looks good gorgeous huh so now we can make it even more gorgeous we're going to switch it to broil we're going to brown that cheese that's on top that'll take about three minutes but you want to keep a close eye on it because it can go from beautiful to burnt in a matter of seconds good tip it's been about three minutes and this casserole is nicely browned do you mind getting that oven door for me you bet okay oh goodness brian that looks amazing thanks so we need to let this rest for about 20 minutes so the cheese will set and it's easily sliceable yeah it looks lava hot it's very hot it's been 20 minutes the eggplant's rested and we're finally ready to eat and i'm ready all right so i'm going to serve you an entire stack here which is i think the way that carmella would like it and we could spoon a little bit of sauce around the bottom of the eggplant and how about some for yours i really love how this is served with a whole stack i know there's a lot of cheese in there but you really taste the eggplant this dish is all about the eggplant it's unlike anything else i've ever had before well if you think about it at every stage you added flavor the tomato sauce had the anchovies and a little bit of red pepper flakes the cheeses were both pretty flavorful but yet the eggplant can stand up to it that's because we didn't overcook it and we didn't bind it with a whole bunch of heavy breading i don't miss the breadcrumbs at all brian this is amazing thank you we should thank carmela for the inspiration so to make this cheesy baked eggplant start by making a flavorful tomato sauce slice the eggplant thinly into long planks coat with flour and egg then fry in olive oil layer the sauce and eggplant with lots of cheese into a dish then bake and broil until it's hot and bubbly from cook's country a great new recipe for eggplant pecorino you can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season along with tastings testings and select episodes at our website cookscountry.com tv thanks for watching cook's country from america's test kitchen so what'd you think leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or just say hi now you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later alligator

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 342,980

Keywords: cooks country, americas test kitchen, cooks illustrated, stuffed shells, cheesy pasta, pasta recipes, eggplant pecorino, eggplant parmesan, eggplant recipes, italian comfort food, comfort food

Id: mOuYEbVfxCY

Length: 23min 12sec (1392 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 10 2021