How to make ricotta cavatelli, tomato sauce and Italian sausage - Play with your food - Ep1

[Music] so today we're gonna make some ricotta cavatelli we're gonna make some pasta today some homemade pasta and beautiful thing about the making of a dough and this recipe too is a really simple recipe we don't need a lot of ingredients to make a nice pasta dish we need a pound of ricotta we need the same weight of double-o flour I'm using double-o flour this is a finer flour so we're gonna have a smoother dough in the end so same amounts if you wanted to make this is for like eight portions if you want to do a bigger batch 2 pounds of ricotta 2 pounds of flour so same quantity ricotta to flour I just put my ricotta overnight in a sieve that's just to get rid of any extra moisture we don't want to have too much of the liquid from the ricotta we're gonna use a little bit of salt 2 eggs and that's all we need a work surface a fork to mix it if you have a little plastic bench scraper you can pick this up from any kitchen store for like a buck and that's what we need we're gonna do this all directly on our work surface so we'll take our 1 pound of flour just gonna put that directly on here we're gonna make a little well in the middle there's a lot of different ways to make a lot of different recipes this is the way that I make a ricotta cavatelli again this is the way I would shown from a Nepali town chef and at this point it's the best recipe that I've used myself you know I trust this recipe and I enjoy it we're gonna take a teaspoon of salt like this we're gonna crack our 2 eggs directly into the center beautiful free-range eggs you can see from those ropes how bright they are you know in color so we've got our 2 eggs directly into the center we're just gonna mix them up a little bit just to start the process you know without incorporating any other flower right now we want to mix our wet ingredients first now we're gonna take our ricotta we're gonna do the same thing we're gonna put the ricotta in the center like this and then very carefully we're just gonna start to mix these wet ingredients together and then so just incorporating again we're not taking any of the flour really we're just mixing the ricotta in with those eggs and then like I was saying this is like the process of love you know you need to be patient with it you need to take your time now it's pretty much incorporated together don't worry of any egg like leaks out of the side we can we can pick that up after you know yeah so now I'm gonna start to incorporate the flour in with the wet and then now with the bench scraper we're gonna pull the flour into the center and kind of cut it like this it takes a little bit of time now it's really starting to come together yeah a little bit we can you can't take out flour so as you can see just to the other side of me I have like a little bit of extra flour just in case we can't add moisture to this but we can add flour to dry it out a little bit so we don't want it to be too dry now okay now I'm gonna start to use my hands because it's really starting to come together so now I'm gonna continue working in there with my hands and as you can see now it's resembling a dough much more this whole process is probably gonna take you about 15 minutes maybe then you're gonna feel we don't want it to be tacky what I mean by that is it's sticky it's too wet you know and in fact I can feel this now that it is a little bit too wet so I have my little container of flour just gonna add a little bit to my work surface we don't want to overwork the dough either what happens if you overwork it is that you'll have hard tough dumplings you know it's finding the right balance having a nice smooth dough we're getting there so now a little bit more flour just on the surface on top a little bit and then if you're going to use a work surface like this it's good to have a plastic one of these and not a metal one because metal it's gonna scratch your countertops you know yeah it's really come together nice like I said what a difference that ricotta cheese makes in there you know you can use regular all-purpose flour for it I just prefer this to find this you know of the double-o flour so this is about it I'm just gonna give it a couple more turns you can always do this in a like a mixing machine you know with a paddle on it I think it's nice to like the skill you know the skill of cooking getting your hands in there and like feeling feeling it doing it for yourself it really didn't take that long you know okay so now you've got a nice dough what we're gonna do is we're gonna wrap that in some saran wrap some cling film and we're just gonna let that rest for about 20 minutes a room temperature you're not gonna put it into the fridge the reason we need to let that rest is that the glutens from the flower is still going to absorb the moisture from the egg and from the ricotta the flower still needs to do its work it needs to absorb all of that before we go back to carry on working it so this we can put to the side and then we'll come back to that in about 20 minutes so our ricotta cavatelli dough is resting we're gonna rest that for like 20 minutes now we're going to make a simple tomato sauce tomato sauce we need some good quality whole tinned Tomatoes we need some good olive oil a little bit of chili flakes I like spice so we're gonna put a little chili flakes in ours a little bit of salt I'll never give you quantities of salt salt is generally to taste we need one stick of basil and we need just the just the rind from the parmesan I'm just gonna grab a knife sharpening it you just want to give the blade a little bit of a wipe just to get rid of any filaments from the steel and then we're just going to cut the end like that because we never really want to waste anything we can use everything generally the skin here that people would just get rid of we're gonna use that to flavor our sauce so we're gonna put it in the sauce and like you mommy and the saltiness from the parmesan rind is gonna go into our sauce you guys have will have a little a shot of the recipe I like the tomatoes tomato sauce garlicky so we're going to put two medium-sized cloves for one large tin of tomatoes so the first thing we want to do just put it on the board and just flatten it out and then the skin just comes off in one piece so we're gonna do that for our garlic just a little little crush some people will say leave it in water for an hour but then the garlic is going to absorb water and when you come to sauteing it it's just gonna boil you're known simmering in like water so we're gonna remove the peel and then we're gonna put a little bit of salt on top of it then what this is gonna do this is going to help to finely chop it the abrasiveness of the salt is going to go against the garlic and you can really get it nice and fine so we're just gonna run this down the little the little green germ in the middle of the garlic a lot of the times working in restaurants will remove that we're cooking at home today you know for friends and family so we're gonna just leave it in there so nice and fine you can also just use a garlic like a crusher you know one of those little garlic clove crushes you can use that even to get your hands dirty but and then you can even hear the salt you can hear the knife going through the soil which is also crushing the garlic and then you can rub it like this too you know and create a paste because the garlic's in there we don't want to paste for this we want tiny pieces of garlic that's our garlic so always one clean hands I'm just gonna wash them off as far as the tomatoes go I like chem textures and just like different shapes and sizes of like the produce that we're using so what I'm gonna do with them the tomato is I'm gonna take my nice clean hands and we're just gonna carefully crush him you want to be careful weave you squeeze them too fast all the liquid inside of the tomato is going to splash all over your apron and your countertop so we're just going to be careful with it and then what that does is you get nice little strips of tomato you get nice little dice of tomatoes you get a lot of little different textures you know so saying that you could also just buy crushed tomatoes or diced tomatoes which is fine but it's all diced or it's all crushed this recipe here not really a recipe but a method I was shown by a Neapolitan chef and I find that this tomato sauce is good across the board it's good for to put on a pizza it's good for alazai yeah it's just a good basic tomato sauce with not a lot of ingredients but if I was to make this in northern Italy for sure the non ER or someone would ask me what the hell I was doing and why was I doing it like this Italian cuisine is all very regional inner so depending on which region you go is the correct way to make a tomato sauce there's not the correct way to make it tomato sauce this is the way I've been there shown and this is my favorite way to do it so just gonna wipe down right we have our garlic chopped we have all of our little bits and pieces that we need I have a pan over here just going to put this on a low heat I have a nice stove behind me but for for this we thought we'd use a little portable stove and if we can do it on a portable stove we can do it on a regular stove so first of all olive oil I don't want it to be too hot like see mom burned his garlic because this pan was too hot I want this to be a low heat then we're gonna add our garlic so there's no simmer you can't hear any sizzle we don't want a sizzle right now we want to toast the garlic gently I'm gonna add a tiny picture of chili flakes a tiny bit of salt and then we're gonna start to so take okay so we're getting a nice light toasted color if it starts frying too much like too harsh just turn down your Heat low and slow is okay you know because if it does and darken too much you're really gonna take it it's gonna ruin the whole sauce you know and like I say we're just looking for like a light golden color I'm nearly there I'm gonna show you once we get where we want to be so this is what we're looking for can you see that yeah light brown and what we're gonna do now we're gonna turn the heat up mid high we're gonna take our tomatoes and we're gonna put it directly in the sauce like that making sure we get all of it and then what we want to do now we're not boiling it we just want to simmer it and we're going to take our basil I'm gonna take the parmesan rind and all we're gonna do is let this slowly simmer for about ten minutes and we're good 10-15 minutes and the sauce is ready and then like always everything I'm gonna do with you guys is always through taste like I said already salt is very seasoning is very personal so I'm gonna give it a little taste I'll taste it in the beginning I'm gonna give it a little bit of salt and then I'll let it simmer now for like 10-15 minutes then I'll give it another taste I don't want to season it too much now because like I said the skin of the parmesan is gonna release some umami and some like salty flavor you know tomato sauce is on the go it starting to smell pretty good in there what do you think it smells good what I'm gonna show you guys now we're gonna make like a vegetarian cavatelli so we have the noodle we have the tomato sauce we're kind of good on that but for those people that want a little extra we always want to do a little extra we're gonna do some really simple meatballs so we're gonna take a sausage any sausage this is a spicy Italian sausage from a local charcuterie so this has been like freshly made I know the guy that made it we're gonna remove the skin very simple we just scroll down the let's go down the side and just pull it out and then all we're gonna do is just tear off little nuggets like this and this is gonna go on our pasta we're gonna do we're gonna saute them in a little bit of oil and these are like a cheats version of a meatball if you really wanted it to be a meatball cut off a bigger piece right and then just roll it into a meatball because we don't all have a lot of time to be making meatballs every day write super fast you can get pork sausages veal sausages beyond meat sausages if you have a vegetarian so you can still like yeah it doesn't matter the type you know this is a pork sausage so this is so I got my little nuggets like that one's going to be enough for this recipe yeah depending on like germs if they've been filled with bread crumbs or Rusk depending on the percentage of meat fat right yeah that's the site yet I mean its food is like super personable right that's the sausage you like I would just use what you like you know yeah whatever you like anything can be mixed and matched you know like I was saying too with the tomatoes if you want to use diced or crush just use that I'm just showing you one way but there's multiple ways to do all of these things and other chefs maybe have what they would say is a better way to do it right but I'm just showing you the way that like I know to do it and the way I like to do so we have our sausage we've got a nice little saute pan we're gonna get this on medium-high a little bit of oil we want to heat the oil quite high because we want to get some nice like crispy nuggets right I'm just gonna get a little Bowl ready with the sieve inside of it because then I want to get rid of the fat so looking for that heat wave you know on the left hand side of your screen you should be able to see a little heat wave once we have that once we see that that's when we have the sausage okay so heat wave you guys saw it that's what we're looking for and then now we want there to be a nice little sizzle we're looking for like nice and crispy on the outside you know we want textures so crispy on the outside soft on the inside if we if we keep mixing it if we turn it too much the moisture is gonna come out and we going to end up boiling the sausage so just leave it let it do it thing so we don't need to cook it 100% right now okay so they've been seared nicely outside nice golden brown crispy nugget so hungry I'm gonna put this back over here with the tomato sauce this is working nicely gonna turn that down I'm gonna go low and slow this has been working for like seven minutes I'm gonna give it like another eight minutes we're gonna say 15 now it's time to start making the cavatelli tomato sauce is on the go this has been resting nice nice we're going to start to make our dumplings what do we need for this I have a little board so I'm gonna be using my cavatelli board this can be news for new yorkese as well this you can buy any kitchen store you can order it online I think this cost me like 10 bucks so like five quid if you are watching in England you can also do it on the back of a fork so I'm going to show you both methods plastic scraper very good if you're using a chopping board you can just use your knife this is just to divide up the dough over here I have some extra dough flour and I also have some semolina flour the thing with the semolina flour is that the pasta isn't going to absorb it it's going to stop it from sticking together but it's not going to absorb it so I'm gonna take some of the semolina flour and I'm just gonna dust my tray this is the tray that the pastor's going to go on afterwards once it's been made so a nice even layer of the semolina flour over here I'm going to take out our demo of dough nice very nice and we're just going to divide it into some manageable pieces and then what we need to do now I'm feeling it in its a little bit it is still a little bit like tacky so I'm just gonna put a little flour on the surface I don't know add too much flour though and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna turn these into little little ropes you can do it like this you can do it just on your table so now I'm gonna spend a bit of time turning all of this into ropes you guys are gonna maybe listen to a little bit of music and have a close up someone's gonna make me a coffee we're gonna be and when you guys come back all of these will be rolling into ropes already okay so we're just finishing up the last couple of ropes we're looking I guess for like one to two centimeter in diameter it definitely doesn't have to be perfect there's something nice actually about sometimes the noodles not being exactly the same shape and size so you can tell it's been homemade you know you can buy cavatelli machines where you would take your rope and you feed it through the machine with a handle and the cavatelli comes out the other side okay so now we're gonna take one of our ropes and we're gonna cut every kind of two centimeters again it doesn't have to be perfect and we're gonna then do that for all of the pieces again doesn't have to be perfect we're gonna just dust it a little bit of semolina flour so they don't all stick together and then using the board I'm going to show you when we use the board we start at the top with our thumb and then we just push it down like that and then we have our beautiful little cavatelli dumplings and then if you want them to be bigger you just cut your rope bigger and if you want it to be smaller just cut them smaller we don't want to put too much pressure on the board we'll have if you put too much pressure on you're gonna have a tough dumpling you know and then we just keep rolling all of these these are going to be nice so as you see when you put when I'm putting down the pressure it's not a lot of pressure pushing it into the board and then it starts to roll on itself and then you then push it off the board for it to like roll onto itself I'm putting it directly onto my tray that I already have semolina flour on and as you can see none of them are sticking together for storage it's a lot easier to store this in the freezer so this is exactly what I'm going to do it cooks well too from frozen I'll have it on the tray like this I'll put it in the freezer and I'll cook it directly from the freezer once this is frozen you can then weigh out a 150 gram portions put them in Ziploc bags and have like portions of cavatelli in your freezer in Ziploc bags and then you'll experiment and play with the shapes and sizes until you're happy with them we're cooking at home so it doesn't have to be as exact is we do like when we're cooking for clients in the restaurant I'm going to show you guys too as well with the fork because everyone has a fork so just cutting more of the little dumplings a little bit of semolina flour again just so it doesn't stick and then using the back of the fork you do the same thing you push it on and then you roll it over and then you're left with a nice little can you see it from there okay now everything's ready tomato sauce is ready on the back the cavatelli is frozen in the freezer we've got our little nuggets of faux meatballs take meatballs to finish the dish we need a little bit of olive oil a little bit of parsley like a sprig of parsley leaves two leaves of basil basil I'm just going to cut out the or remove pull out the thickest stem yeah here I'm just used to doing it you know we can do it at home so we're just going to pull that out just so that we have like this soft part of the herb and then we're just going to chop all of this together again making sure we have a really sharp knife if the knife isn't sharp it just means that the herbs could like Brown you know always having like a little bits of meson plas or all our ingredients nicely lined up and ready we got our herbs our sausage our olive oil we also need them some parmesan this is the parmesan if you remember we took off the skin that we put in the sauce so we're not wasting too much for me to tell you an amount of cheese is kind of tough it's just to taste you know so if you like it really cheesy you're gonna add more some people don't like a lot of cheese maybe you're not gonna add any so I'm just gonna grate a little bit of that and then we are ready to assemble so behind me I have a pot of water salted water just going to crank that up that's for our pasta when cooks or chefs tell you to season the water it should taste a little bit less than the ocean so again everything's for taste right someone could tell you to put a tablespoon of salt in a pot but how BIG's the part how much water's in the pot what type of salt are you using so you add your salt into the pot if it tastes a little salty it's enough you know that's good so that's going to season the the dough there the noodle you know so I got my water ready we're gonna take a ladle full of our tomato sauce I'm just gonna put that in the bottom you can hear the water's boiling so I'm gonna grab the cavatelli though cavatelli was in the freezer nicely frozen and then we're just gonna give it a little mix and then cuz of the semolina flour it's not all sticking together we got like two portions here I'm gonna make one portion for the guy behind the camera I'll make mine later medium low just to get a little simmer cheese perfect this we're gonna put in the water it normally takes about two minutes okay tomato sauce is simmering pastas ready I'm going to bring the pastor over pastor's floating to the top one thing that when I first started making pasta I didn't realize how important it was was to add pasta water I've worked with a lot of Italian cooks in the past you know and they were said every time they're making a pasta pasta water pasta water and I didn't really really understand like how important it was but what the pasta water does is the starch from the noodle that you've been cooking in the water the starch goes into the liquid so we take that starch we add it back into our sauce and the starch is what's gonna make the sauce stick to the noodle so we do need to add pasta water don't need to add a great deal you can add a couple of tablespoons you know and like I said that's just gonna help the sauce to stick to our noodle you know or our dumpling back on the stove now we're just gonna work it we're gonna we're not I heard we're gonna put in some of these sausage nuggets you eat sausage right okay mix that in nice it's a tomato sauce sausage now we're gonna add the parsley and basil and put all of that in a little bit of cheese cool a little bit of olive oil the olive oil is gonna give it a nice like peppery taste it's also going to make the pasta shut it's gonna give it a nice shine to the dish you know a little nice and then we're gonna we're gonna drip we're gonna dress this up turn off the heat get a little spoon this out of the way smells good it smelled really good like that and then a little bit of olive oil on top and then we're gonna finish it with a little bit more cheese and there we have our cavatelli with tomato sauce Italian sausage and basil enjoy okay let's see let's taste it mmm oh it's really good with the ricotta in the cavatelli it's nice and soft you know it's not like a a dense dumpling it's soft a little bit of spice from the chili flakes very nice and then because I used a spicy Italian sausage there's also spice from that this is really nice I think you guys are gonna love it enjoy happy cooking

Channel: Oli Harding

Views: 13,312

Keywords: #pasta, #cooking, #cavatelli, #italian, #tomato #sauce, #recipe, #pastarecipe

Id: SVIyflY0HAI

Length: 29min 41sec (1781 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 08 2020