A very characteristic recipe from Romagna: passatelli in brodo are pasta made with parmesan cheese and breadcrumbs in broth – perfect for rainy days to warm up! Not your typical pasta, but very yummy!
I needed one more recipe to round out the Emilia-Romagna recipe series and I didn’t want to make stuffed pasta again. So this actually a bit unusual pasta recipe made with bakery flour and parmesan, which is very typical of the region.
Luckily it was still a bit cooler here in Mumbai (28 degrees at noon) due to the Monsoon when I cooked this, because actually this is a fall and winter recipe. I was beginning to think I’d have to crank up the air conditioning, but the night we ate this, it was decently cool.
Variations of the dish exist many, for example with truffles or with zucchini. But here is the original recipe in broth. On the coast, the meat broth is often replaced by fish stock and grated lemon peel is added instead of nutmeg.
Although a very simple dish in terms of ingredients, it is something that is often served at festivities. The whole thing tastes very very delicious, very umami 🙂.
Tips for preparation
Very important: don’t use industrially produced breadcrumbs. Either make it yourself from stale bread or get some from your local bakery. The differences in taste are enormous. In any case, put the breadcrumbs in a blender to get the finest possible crumbs, almost dusty. Otherwise it will be too coarse and your passatelli will fall apart, at the latest in the cooking pot.
Almost as important: the recipes I found almost all used a potato ricer with coarse holes. But I didn’t have one. So I figured I’d just use something else, and I saw that an insert in my food processor had holes about 6 mm in diameter. And then I just tried to press the dough through them.
It worked only moderately. The noodles had a length of 1-5 cm. But they should be more like 7 cm long. I think this is achieved with the potato press rather and is guaranteed also much easier to handle. Also, I think my Parmesan was not grated finely enough. This I should have made perhaps once briefly finer in the blender.
I then gathered the few noodles that were 5 cm long for the photo above. The rest of the misery, you can see in the following picture.
Apart from that I had to add a little bit of water to the dough. Before it was much too crumbly. But that was probably due to the rather small eggs (size S-M) that I get here around the corner, thus the dough had too little moisture.
When cooking the passatelli, let the broth in the pot only boil hot, not bubbling. Otherwise, the pasta will also fall apart.
My passatelli tasted very good. Even if they were a little short. But not everything can always be a success, especially if you improvise like I did with the missing press.
Learn more about the cuisine of Emilia-Romagna and all my recipes of the region on this page.
Passatelli romagnola in brodo – Original recipe from Emilia-Romagna
Equipment
- potato ricer with ¼ in wide openings
Ingredients
- 150 g breadcrumbs very fine
- 150 g parmesan finely grated
- 3 eggs
- nutmeg
- salt
- meat broth
Instructions
- Make sure both the Parmesan and the breadcrumbs are nice and fine so they combine well.
- Mix all the ingredients together (except the broth, of course) until you have a homogeneous mixture.
- Now divide this into balls of about 3 cm and press these balls through a potato ricer. I didn't have a press, so I improvised. You can read more about this failed experiment in the blog entry above.
- The passatelli should be about 7 cm long.
- Now place the passatelli in the lightly simmering meat broth for 5 minutes and serve while still in the broth.Buon appetito!
Please rate my recipe before you leave 🙂:
The source of this recipe: https://www.romagnaatavola.it/it/passatelli-brodo-la-piu-caratteristica-ricetta-romagna/. Cooked with love (and this time lots of nerves) on From zero to curry.
