Manicotti Homemade

Italian Grandmom Cooks

Manicotti – This is an adorable video featuring a wonderful Italian Grandmom teaching how to make Manicotti in that beautiful broken English. If nothing else you can put this video on in the backround as you do something else and just listen to her talk as she teaches. 

Every year at Thanksgiving we would have Manicotti before the turkey. Usually a bowl of escarole soup followed by Manicotti. Our American friends looked at us crosseyed but that was and continues to be Thanksgiving. I enjoyed making Manicotti with my Grandmother back in the day. She always made her own dough and ricotta cheese for that matter. Grandmom would send me down to the American Store to by renet tablets and cheese cloth which she would use to make the ricotta.

Manicotti  meaning “little shirtsleeve”, is a kind of pasta. It also means “cooked hands” (mani = hands, cotti = cooked), referring to hands being burnt when making the crepes traditionally used to create this dish. They are very large pasta tubes, usually ridged, that are intended to be stuffed and baked. The filling is generally ricotta cheese mixed with cooked chopped spinach, Sometimes ground meat such as veal is used. They are subsequently topped with béchamel sauce, usually made with Pecorino Romano cheese, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, tomato sauce or some combination of these.

Similar to the Italian cannelloni, manicotti can be extruded in tube form, or rolled from sheets of dough. The shells can be purchased commercially although in our house if we have the time we prefer to make our own.

The traditional version of the manicotti recipe uses a crêpe instead of pasta tubes to contain the filling, which is similarly covered in sauce and baked.

Watch this beautiful video below. Learn her recipe.

Listen to her speak Adorable..!