focaccette al formaggio
fried cheese focaccia
Calling these huge, cheese-filled ravioli 'focaccia' might seem something of a misnomer, but that's exactly what they're called on the Riviera west of Genova. That's the spiritual home of Ligurian focaccia and also the 'trofie' pasta shape.
After WW2, Recco emerged as the world capital of the baked version of cheese focaccia, which is baked in an oven like pizza but has a tissue-thin upper crust of pastry cover a filling of molten stracchino cheese. Since the 1960s and 1970s cheese focaccia has become known throughout Italy and around the world, but the fried version of the same dish is still relatively unkown outside Italy.
My cheese focaccia epiphany came around the summer of 1978, when my grandmother moved house from central Genova to the village of Polanesi, between the towns of Sori and Recco. A family friend cooked this ultra-local dish and for children like my brother and I, it was a taste of pure paradise. It was simply impossible to source stracchino in South Wales in the 1970s so we'd obsess about this dish all year until the next summer holiday came around.
Today it's relatively easy to find stracchino in Italian delicatessens in the UK, but quite hard to find stracchino with the sharp 'bite' that's common in Liguria. If you can find it, GALBANI stracchino is one of the most authentic tasting, but it's more common to come across brands like Nonno Nanni, which you can find online at stockists like NifeisLife. (Nonno Nanni is a lot less sharp and more creamy tasting than you'll find in Liguria, which is a shame because the srahpness really helps to make the dish seem a lot less richer than it actually is!).
WHAT YOU'LL NEED TO DO
(scroll down for the full method)
make the pasta dough
rest the dough for at least 30 min
make the focaccette (30-60min!)
fry the focaccette
fried cheese focaccia
INGREDIENTS
FOR APPROX 12 FOCACCETTE
approx 300g Manitoba flour
sparkling mineral water
EVO
salt
approx 500g of stracchino
METHOD
I learnt to make cheese foaccia entirely by eye, making fresh dough with just flour, olive oil, salt and mineral water, so I'm going to encourage you to experiment and work it out for yourself. The quantities in the ingredients section on this page are really just guidelines - but if you watch the video and read everything else here it shouldn't take you too many tries before you make fantastic focaccette al formaggio.
It's really essential to use strong, Manitoba-style flour, as it's much easier to work with and actually produces lighter focaccette than 00 flour. You'll also struggle to make cheese focaccia easily if you don't use a pasta machine to roll out the dough - it'll be very hard work to get it consistently thin enough for good results.
Begin by making a well in a pile of flour and gradually add the water, oil and salt to make the dough. Knead it for at least 10-15 minutes, and then let it rest in a fridge for 30-45 mins. See the video on this page of me doing this.
Begin to roll out small amounts of the dough with a rolling pin until you can put it through a pasta machine. Make long thin strips of about 100cm at once, down to the penultimate thickness setting on an Imperia pasta machine. Make sure you thoroughly flour all surfaces so the dough doesn't stick!
Make large 'ravioli', each filled with about a dessert spoon and a half of stracchino. Seal the ravioli with milk, making sure to revove as much excess air as you do so... this helps them ballooning and bursting in the frying pan. Cut the focacce with a crimped pasta wheel.
Shallow frying is the traditional cooking method - but you'll need at least 1.5am depth of oil in the pan, and be prepared to either change oil or have another pan going if you're making large quantities. Be EXTREMELY carefull with frying with open pans and oil and, quite seriously, don't attempt this unless you have a fire blanket or a wet tea cloth at the ready.... just in case!
NUTRITION per serving
In the interests of public morale I'm not going to post nutrition information for fried pasta stuffed with cheese.
