Simply speaking, the dish Spinach and Ricotta Cannelloni is baked cannelloni pasta tubes, stuffed with spinach and ricotta filling and covered in marinara sauce and mozzarella. Spinach leaves are blanched and added to a pan of sauteed garlic and onions, along with grated parmesan cheese, oregano, grated nutmeg and seasoned with salt and pepper. The ricotta cheese is added to this and mixed well. While ricotta translates to recooked in Italian, traditional ricotta cheese is actually made from the whey leftover from the production of other cheeses. The whey is heated, usually after adding some whole milk and some sort of vinegar or citrus juice and the remaining curds in the whey start to coagulate. This coagulated curd is then strained and what you get is the white and fluffy ricotta cheese. Though the actual recipe calls for cannelloni pasta, which is a tube shaped, dry pasta, this recipe uses lasagne sheets as they are more readily available than cannelloni pasta. This spinach and ricotta mixture is stuffed in lasagne sheets, rolled into tubes, and placed on a greased dish, with heated tomato sauce (see Tomato Sauce for Pasta recipe in this section). More tomato sauce is added along with grated mozzarella cheese covering the whole tubes of pasta and baked until golden. This recipe for a cheesy pasta, with the goodness of spinach is definitely something worth trying!
Details
4 Servings
20 Minutes
30 Minutes
491 / Portion
Print
Ingredients
- For Pasta Stuffing
Lasagne Sheets 300 gms
Spinach 100 gms
Ricotta Cheese 60 gms
Garlic chopped 20 gms
Onions chopped 800 gms
Basil Leaves 20 gms
Parmesan Cheese 30 gms
Dried Oregano 3 gms
Nutmeg grated 3 gms
Salt and Black Pepper to taste
- For Assembling
Tomato Sauce 200 gms (See Tomato Sauce for Pasta recipe in this section)
Mozzarella Cheese 60 gms
Extra Virgin Olive oil 20 ml
Salt to taste
Black Pepper crushed to taste
Directions
- Place a large vessel with water and let it boil. Add salt.
- Boil the lasagne pasta. The pasta should be tender but still firm to the bite. The stage is called ‘al dente’ in Italian. Drain the pasta, rinse it in cold water and place in a large bowl.
- For the stuffing
- Remove the stems from the spinach. Wash the spinach and drain the water.
- Heat a vessel with water and let it boil. Blanch spinach in boiling water for two minutes and drain.
- Transfer the spinach immediately into cold ice water to stop the cooking. Drain and gently squeeze out excess moisture from spinach.
- Heat olive oil, add chopped garlic, saute, and add chopped onions. Cook till translucent.
- Add the blanched spinach and saute for a minute and add grated parmesan cheese, oregano, grated nutmeg, salt and black pepper. Check the seasoning.
- Add the ricotta cheese to the spinach and mix well.
- Drain each lasagne sheet and stuff it with about 2 tbsp of the mixture and roll into tubes.
- To assemble the Cannelloni
- Heat the tomato sauce and pour half the sauce into a large ovenproof greased dish.
- Preheat the oven to 180 degree celsius.
- Arrange the tubes in the dish. Pour over the remaining tomato sauce ensuring all the cannelloni tubes are well covered with the sauce.
- Add grated mozzarella cheese over the tomato sauce and cover it well.
- Bake at 180 degree celsius for 20 minutes or until golden.
- To serve, garnish with chopped parsley. Drizzle a dash of extra virgin olive oil. Serve with crispy garlic bread or any salad of your choice.
Chef’s Twist :- Use cannelloni or manicotti pasta tubes if they are available.