Saturday, March 14, 2009

Sweet Potato Angoletti from the French Laundry

I stumbled across the Frech Laundry at Home website a couple years ago (check out the proper way to make this on her site). I was impressed by Carol's ability to tackle some of those recipes. When I finally got the Fench Laundry cookbook, my girlfriend told me I had to make her something from it. After looking through some recipes, I decided to go with the Sweet Potato Angoletti. The flavors sounded great, the recipe did not call for any hard to find ingredients, and it did not seem like it would take too long. However, I was missing one very important thing...a pasta maker. I just assumed I could roll it out by hand. This turned out not to be such a good assumption, which you'll see.

With that out of the way, let's get started.

First thing is to get the sweet potatoes in the over to cook. I wrapped them in foil with a little bit of butter. It took about an hour and a half. Here they are after coming out of the oven.

After peeling them, I put them into a large pot. And since I do not own a ricer, I used my immersion blender. I knew the teture was probably going to be a little smoother but I didn't think it would make a difference and it didn't as far as I could tell.

Next I made the pasta dough. You measure out the flour and form a well to add the eggs, egg yolk, milk and olive oil.

Then slowly mix this together with your fingers, pulling in the flour from the sides as you swirl the wet ingredients around.
Once the dough comes together you knead it until it becomes smooth. Then cover in plastic wrap and let it rest while you prepare the other parts of the recipe.

At this point I sauted the bacon in a skillet and added it to the sweet potato mash along with some allspice (since I did not have squab spice), salt, pepper and mustard.

While this was chilling in the fridge, I made the sage cream. This was the easiest part of the recipe. I blanched some sage leaves and added them to warmed butter and creme fraiche. Here it is in its finished stage.
So nows comes the interesting part. Since I do not own a pasta maker, I decided I could roll the pasta out by hand. Well I was wrong...sort of. Here I am starting to roll out the dough. About 20 minutes later and much rolling and cramping of my hands, I was able to see my hand through the dough as it says you should be able to in the book. Well as it turns out, this thinness is not exactly the same as seeing your hand through the dough when using a pasta maker. Oh well, it was time to fill the angoletti. I put the sweet potato mix into a ziplock bag and cut off the tip. I then piped a line of this a little to the left of center of the dough. I then folded them up and added them to a pot of boiling water for a couple minutes. Once they were done I dropped them into the sage cream sauce. I put them in a bowl and topped it with brown butter, and thinly slice prosciutto. Here's the final plating.

The taste of these was amazing. One of the best things I have ever made. The only bad thing was that this recipe called for making 48 angoletti, and with my inability to make the pasta sheets thin enough I came out with about 18. All in all not a perfect outcome in terms of execution but the flavor combination was perfect. Sweet, salty, creamy, porky. This is one of the best tasting recipes I have ever made and it is a testament to why Chef Keller is one of the greatest. I will definitely make this again. Just next time I plan on using a pasta maker.