Italian dumplings
Li Tao
I'm from northern China, and although I used to eat rice at home when I was a child, I actually liked pasta in general, such as flapjacks, steamed buns, and so on. In foreign countries, their pasta is mainly bread, and it is not bad to eat it for breakfast, if it is morning sliced bread, lunch sandwich bread, dinner hamburger bread, it must be vomited. So often pasta, pizza mixed, sometimes also eat dumplings, Italian dumplings.
Two commonly used names for Italian dumplings, one is ravioli, which is basically a rectangular dumpling; the other is torttellini, which is basically similar to the Chinese wonton. Whether it is ravioli or torttellini, may not be able to reach the concept of Chinese dumplings "bag", their dumplings are more like "packing", making the dough into a pocket to fill the filling, especially ravioli, may not even be loaded, can only be "covered".
Let's start with ravioli, let's call it Italian dumplings. It is similar to noodles and Chinese noodles, but not only add water, but add eggs, oil and milk to the flour, and after forming a ball, you must also "wake up the noodles", generally wake up for more than half an hour. Fillings Italians prefer pumpkin stuffing or crab filling. It is made with pumpkin or crab meat as the main ingredient, salt, pepper, chopped nuts, chopped shallots or chopped spinach. Now why is it called "cover"? The way they make dumplings is to sprinkle flour on a panel, roll the dough into large slices, and then cut the large dough into large rectangles, about two dumplings wide and ten dumplings long. Then spoon the filling into the dough, evenly spaced. After that, brush the area around the filling with egg mixture or water to facilitate the bonding of the two pieces of dough. Then, like a quilt, cover the second dough, gently press it with your hands, pay attention to the middle and press outward, and then use a wheel knife to cut the edges of each dumpling, so that it is ten dumplings.
Tortellini is a packet by bag, which is first cut into small square dough slices, filled with a spoonful of filling, and then folded in half into a triangle, pressing the skin along the filling. Circle the two bottom corners around your fingers again, wetting the edges and sticking them together. Finally, the top corner is folded up, the edges are wet, and they stick together, becoming a small meta treasure shape. That's it.
The way to eat Italian dumplings is different from the Chinese harmony, which is eaten with dipping sauce after cooking. The common chinese dipping sauce is vinegar oil garlic juice, while most of the Italian dumplings have to be put on the dumplings and then processed. It is common to stir-fry the side dishes first. Chop a variety of seasonal vegetables and onions, sauté them in a saucepan with butter, add salt to continue sautéing to soften, then put the cooked dumplings in the baking sheet, sprinkle with cheese powder and vanilla powder and bake them in the oven for 10 minutes.
Most of the Chinese feel that the Italian dumplings are less filling, the cheese taste is too strong, and the skin is relatively hard and not refreshing. But for me, it is already an improvement in my life, especially once I bought lapa bean paste in the supermarket, directly cooked the dumplings and ate them, which was actually quite satisfied.