Brodo en Tortellini
Sometimes it takes the mind of a child to trigger something unexpected. Last week I set up my 4 year old with some leftover pasta dough and an assortment of kitchen tools to buy myself a little quiet. He took a big hunk of the dough and made a little bowl and said something to the effect of "Let's put soup inside this." It got me thinking about soup dumplings, how much I miss eating them and what the Italian equivalent would be. There's canederli en brodo, passatelli, and of course the iconic tortellini en brodo - but nothing that was really close to the experience of eating a soup dumpling. All of them were in fact the opposite of what I was thinking. Dumplings or noodles floating in broth, not the other way around. Would it be possible to create without the aid of fancy molecular gastronomy tools? Would they be steamed like a traditional Xiao long bao or boiled as you would pasta? Would all the brodo leak out? Would they even be any good? If done properly I couldn't think of any reason why they wouldn't be, so I was determined to see if it was possible. A few days later, after several iterations on the method, I had it. Brodo en tortellini. A rich bone broth, simmered hard for 10+ hours, topped off with hunks of parmesan and grated nutmeg, chilled until it sets into a gelatinous form, carefully spooned into a thin square of pasta dough, wrapped up into a tortelli, sealed with an egg wash to prevent leaks, simmered in a shallow water bath until the pasta is perfectly cooked and the brodo is liquified, drained and drizzled with some high quality extra virgin olive oil, kissed by a turn of black pepper and finished with freshly grated parmesan.
I'm committing multiple crimes against tradition here, but I must say these are pretty fun. As you bite into each tortelli you get an explosion of brodo in your mouth. I kept this recipe super simple to create a baseline but I think there are all sorts of ways you could riff on this, between the nuances of the brodo, and how you finish it all off. The video includes multiple iterations of the process (condensed together into one timeline) with the final product at the end using 100% duck egg yolks instead of whole chicken eggs (which is what you'll see on screen). I also gradually pushed the sfoglia a few notches thinner once I found the egg wash did a good job sealing the brodo inside. The goal was a pasta delicate enough so it pops in your mouth like a delicious water balloon.
Credit to @jakehow for the cute name.
Brodo ingredients.
