Italian Sausage & Ricotta Cannelloni
Italian Sausage & Ricotta Cannelloni 🍝🌿 Using San Remo's Instant Cannelloni, a baked pasta never fails when bringing family and friends together. You can prep everything in advance and bake before serving, using San Remo instant cannelloni which require no pre-boiling; making it truly stress free in my eyes.
Ingredients
For the tomato sauce:
- ¼ cup olive oil
- 1 onion, finely chopped
- 4 cloves garlic, finely sliced
- 1 cup basil leaves
- 2 x 400g tins whole tomatoes
For the filling:
- ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
- 300g Italian pork and fennel sausages, sliced to remove the meat and meat pulled apart into 3cm pieces
- 4 cloves garlic, finely chopped or grated
- 1 tsp fennel seeds
- 1 tsp chilli flakes (optional)
- 400g ricotta
- 100g baby spinach, roughly chopped
- 100g Parmesan, finely grated (Grana Padano or Parmigiano Reggiano)
For the bechamel:
- 30g unsalted butter
- 30g plain or 00 flour
- Pinch of finely grated nutmeg
- 300ml full cream milk
- 50g Parmesan, finely grated (Grana Padano or Parmigiano Reggiano)
For the assembly:
- 250g San Remo Instant Cannelloni
- Piping bag
- 50g Parmesan, finely grated (Grana Padano or Parmigiano Reggiano)
Serves 6
Method
- Preheat oven to 180°C.
- First, make the tomato sugo. Heat olive oil over low heat in a saucepan.
- Add onions and garlic to oil and sweat on low heat, until translucent.
- Crush in tinned tomatoes by hand, then add basil and a good pinch of salt.
- Cook on low for 30-45 minutes, stirring occasionally and breaking up tomatoes with the back of a wooden spoon.
- For the cannelloni filling, heat olive oil in a pan over medium high heat.
- Fry sausage pieces until golden brown.
- Add garlic, chilli and fennel seeds and cook until fragrant, breaking up the sausage until ground while they cook.
- Pour into a mixing bowl, add ricotta, baby spinach and Parmesan and stir to combine. Taste the mix and then season (the sausage is already salty so it won’t need much).
- Spoon into a piping bag and set aside.
- For the bechamel, melt butter over medium heat in a saucepan.
- Whisk in the flour and nutmeg and cook, stirring constantly, until deeply golden. It will smell toasty and biscuity.
- Bit by bit, whisk in the milk over medium heat. Continue to whisk whilst heating until the sauce is smooth and noticeably thickened, then turn off the heat.
- Whisk in Parmesan and season to taste.
- Cover with a lid to prevent a skin forming.
- Pour half of the tomato sauce into the base of a large oven dish (approx 25x40cm).
- Pipe filling into cannelloni tubes, then place them in a single layer in your oven dish.
- Top with remaining tomato sauce, cover with bechamel and finish with Parmesan.
- Bake uncovered for 30-35 minutes, until bubbling at the sides and top is golden brown. You can use the grill setting at the end to brown the top further if needed.
- Remove from the oven and cool for at least 10 mins before serving.