Culurgiones
Culurgiones
Sardinian-Style Potato and Pecorino Pasta Parcels
Culurgiones—aka culungionis, culurzones, and cruguxonis, to name a few fun dialect terms—are ornate pasta parcels that are pinched closed with a seam that is meant to resemble a stalk of wheat. The traditional potato-garlic-cheese filling gives them quite a bit of heft. I’m partial to the way they do it at Ovile Bertarelli, a working farm and trattoria in Baunei: they scale up the cheese and scale down the garlic in the traditional filling and serve the culurgiones dressed with a sausage-and-tomato sauce like Malloreddus alla Campidanese.
Serve them Bertarelli style, with a Burro e Salvia sauce, Sugo Povero, or the sauce of your choice.
Ingredients (11)
Ingredients (11)
For the pasta
For the filling
Instructions
Make the pasta
Pour the flour (2 ⅘ cups) into a bowl and make a well in the middle. Add the water (1 cup) and olive oil (1 tsp) to the well, then mix with a fork, working from the edges of the well into the center, gradually incorporating the flour to form a shaggy dough. The dough should feel tacky but not sticky.
Knead the dough energetically just until it is a smooth, compact mass, 10 to 12 minutes.
Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and allow it to rest at room temperature for 30 minutes before shaping.
Make the filling
Stir together the potatoes (1 lb), milk (2 Tbsp), pecorino fresco (1 ½ cups), Pecorino Sardo (1 ½ cups), mint (2 Tbsp), garlic (½ clove), olive oil (2 Tbsp), and salt to taste in a large bowl to combine. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside in the refrigerator.
Unwrap the dough and use a pasta machine or rolling pin to roll it out to a thickness of 1/16 inch. Using a 2 ½-inch cookie cutter or the rim of a water glass, cut the dough into disks.
Roll 2 Tbsp of the filling into a ball and place it in the center of a disk of dough. Repeat with the remaining filling. Pickup the disk with your non-dominant hand, squeezing the pasta gently around the filling. Using your other hand and starting atone end, alternate folding and pinching the pasta along the seam to seal. Some filling may overflow the pasta; simply pinch it off as you seal the pasta at the last fold. Set aside on a clean, dry work surface or a clean kitchen towel dusted with semolina while you seal the remaining pasta.
Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil over high heat. Salt the water until it tastes like a seasoned soup. Add the culurgiones and cook until they are cooked through at the seam, 4 to 5 minutes.
Drain the pasta and carefully transfer to a pan with your desired sauce.
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