How can we justify our ardent love of pasta? Only constant sports and a moving lifestyle! We take it into service and fearlessly turn to cooking pasta in an unusual way. Namely, consider how to cook stuffed pasta "shells".
The preparation of this dish can be divided into two stages: boiling "shells" and stuffing them. Some recipes also include subsequent baking in the oven of stuffed pasta with sauce.
Step one. Boil pasta conciglioni
Shell pasta (aka conciglioni) from durum wheat should be thrown into salted boiling water and cook until half cooked (about 8 minutes). Choose large "shells" so that they can accommodate enough stuffing.
Then you should drain the water and add a little vegetable oil, mix everything so that the pasta does not stick together.
Step Two Cooking toppings
Next, in order to cook the stuffed pasta “shells” we must choose the type of filling. The selection here is quite extensive. Therefore, consider a few of the most common recipes.
- Mushroom mince is prepared by frying mushrooms in a preheated frying pan, which must be ground beforehand. Add the finely chopped onion there. Separately, boil the chicken fillet and divide by hand into small pieces. Stir with mushrooms and add salt, black pepper, herbs (parsley, cilantro).
- Meat filling. We take the actual minced beef and fry in vegetable oil. In another skillet, fry the finely chopped onion and two cloves of garlic. Then add them to the minced meat. While the minced meat is cooling, you need to grate any hard cheese, finely chop the parsley. Then add cheese, herbs, salt, black pepper to the minced meat. Thus, the filling for shells is ready. It should be noted that minced and pasta dishes are quite popular. Therefore, the recipe using minced meat will be well received by home and guests.
- Shrimp filling. To prepare such, shrimp should be boiled, peeled, finely chopped. Then add a couple of heads of garlic, passed through a crush. As well as chopped greens, cheese (previously grated), a drop of olive oil, salt.
- Curd filling. A beautiful and tasty filling will require the following ingredients: cottage cheese, hard cheese, parsley, a couple of cloves of garlic. Mix them all, if necessary, you can salt. And all, a fairly quick way to cook stuffed pasta "shells".
Step Three Roasting sauce
Almost always stuffed conciglioni should be baked in the oven with sauce. The result is a complete dish. In this case, before you send the pasta “shells” stuffed into the oven, you need to make sure that the sauce covers the products completely. This will prevent drying out of the top.
The time that the dish spends in the oven is approximately 20-30 minutes. In principle, everyone should calculate this period individually, based on the capabilities of their oven.
Thus, the scheme - the answer to the question of how to cook stuffed pasta is as follows: boil the conciglioni until half cooked, while they are boiling, prepare the filling, then we stuff the “shells” and bake in the sauce. Sauces may be as follows:
- Tomato sauce. Bring tomato paste in water to a state of liquid sour cream, at the same time, fry the tomatoes in a pan (after peeling the skin). Then pour the resulting tomato juice into a pan and simmer for about 20 minutes. Then you can add salt, pepper, herbs (parsley, cilantro).
- Bechamel sauce. 2 medium onions should be finely chopped and boiled in 800ml. milk. After the milk has cooled, strain. Melt a piece of butter in a frying pan and fry flour on it until golden brown. Then you need to pour milk into the flour, salt and cook for about 15 minutes, stirring constantly. Bechamel is ready.