Spooky Fagottini pasta for Halloween
Fagottini pasta: If you follow The Pasta Maker, it should come as no surprise to learn that an opportunity to create something fun with pasta, is on the menu every day. With Halloween coming soon, we decided to make ‘spooky’ fagottini pasta. These are stuffed pasta that look like little parcels and when you turn them up-side-down, they look like little ghosts – well that’s how I made mine.
All of our pasta is made the Italian way, using semolina, the color of which is a light, creamy yellow. This can be challenging when it comes to adding ingredients to create our colored pasta, especially reds and blues. Creating white pasta is also extremely tricky so we had to resort to a bit of witchcraft and unnatural coloring to achieve it. Many thanks go to Wiltons white-white icing color which is extremely dense, so a little went a long, long way.
How we made our Spooky Fagottini Pasta
We made our egg pasta dough in the usual way, adding drops of ‘white-white’ to the mix until a nice shade of white was achieved. Then it was left to rest for up to an hour, in the usual way.
The dough was rolled out to the thickness of a lasagna sheet just as we do for all of our ravioloni and tortelloni. We used a mini muffin tray to achieve the perfectly sized fagottini and so it was necessary to cut the rolled out dough into 4″ squares.
Next we laid the pasta dough over the cavity of a mini muffin. It turns out that the handle of one of our ravioli cutters is the perfect size for pressing the dough into the cavity.
Once the cavity is formed into the dough, you fill it with your favorite ravioli filling. We happened to have some butternut squash and ricotta handy. We filled the cavity level with the tray. We then spritzed the outer sheet of pasta with a little water. Next, we carefully removed the near-ready fagottini and carefully brought together the pasta to form a little parcel.
All that was left to do next was to stick on some eyes and leave it to dry for long enough to be able to stand it up for a photo.
No doubt the eyes and mouth would not stand up to being boiled since we simply stuck them on with the aid of a little water, although it too is made of pasta. We made that by adding carbonized vegetable powder to the dough.
There you have it! You have the technique for making fagottini (also known as sachetti). They are a bit fiddly, so worth saving for very, very special occasion like Halloween …. Oooooooooo!