Caramelle are wrapped like a boiled sweet: a 55 mm sheet rectangle, filling in the middle, both ends twisted in opposite directions. The twist is the seal, and it is the only filled shape here with no crimped edge at all.
Flours
Doppio Zero soft wheat (00)
Egg
Whole eggs and vegetable purée
Water
50%
Sheet
1.2 mm
Form
55 mm
Drying
Flat on a tray · 2h
Work
85 min + 30 min rest
Serves
5
1The ratio
Zucchini Caramelle, Wrapped Like a Sweet — 5 portions
Flour
g
baker’s %
Doppio Zero soft wheat (00)
400
100%
Egg
3 whole eggs
50%
purée
50
13%
olive oil
10
3%
salt
4
1%
Dough weight
614 g
50% Water
Per portion ≈ 123 g. Every ratio on this site is a baker’s percentage against the flour weight.
2The roller
mm
14.8 mm
24.2 mm
33.4 mm
42.6 mm
52 mm
61.6 mm
71.2 mm
80.9 mm
90.6 mm
Notch by notch1 → 2 → 3 → 5 → 6 → 7
Cut at 7 (1.2 mm) → 55 mm Form
3The filling
Zucchini, ricotta and lemon
Flour
500 g small zucchini, grated coarse
250 g cow's ricotta, drained
60 g parmigiano
Zest of 1 unwaxed lemon
10 g mint, chopped
8 g salt, white pepper
Method
Grate the zucchini, toss with 8 g of salt, and leave in a colander for 30 minutes. Squeeze handful by handful until no more liquid comes out — 500 g of zucchini yields about 260 g of usable flesh.
Fry the squeezed zucchini in a dry pan for 4 minutes to drive off the last of the water, then cool completely.
Beat the ricotta with the parmigiano and lemon zest, fold in the zucchini and mint, and check the salt — the zucchini already brought some.
Chill 30 minutes before piping.
Sauce for this
Lemon, zucchini and butter
柠檬西葫芦黄油
Lemon and zucchini butter keeps the whole plate in one register — the filling and the sauce are the same vegetable, which sounds repetitive and is actually the point: the lemon zest and the raw mint are what stop it being monotonous.
Holds 3% vegetable
Flour
3 small zucchini, sliced into 2 mm coins
60 g butter
Zest and juice of 1 unwaxed lemon
20 g mint, chopped
50 g parmigiano
Black pepper
Method
Cook the zucchini in half the butter over high heat so they colour before they release water, about 3 minutes.
Add the rest of the butter and the lemon zest, then 60 ml pasta water.
Swirl into a pale green sauce; do not let it boil once the zest is in.
Off the heat add the lemon juice, mint and parmigiano.
Zest in the pan, juice off the flame. Boiled lemon juice turns the sauce bitter and grey-green.
Salting and squeezing the zucchini
Zucchini is 94% water and it gives that water up slowly. Thirty minutes of salting followed by hand-squeezing is not optional: unsqueezed, 500 g of zucchini puts 200 ml of water into the filling, and the caramelle will weep on the tray within twenty minutes.
Grate on the coarse side of a box grater. A fine grate turns the flesh to paste, and paste cannot be squeezed — it just passes through the cloth.
Cutting rectangles, not squares
Caramelle need 55 by 40 mm rectangles. Cut them with a wheel from a 1.2 mm sheet, which is thicker than a ravioli sheet on purpose: the twist compresses the dough at both ends and a 0.9 mm sheet tears at the twist under its own tension.
Keep the cut rectangles under a damp cloth — there are a lot of them, and the last ones will have been sitting for fifteen minutes by the time you get to them.
The twist that seals the sweet
Pipe 10 g of filling along the centre of each rectangle, leaving 15 mm clear at both ends.
Roll the rectangle into a cylinder around the filling, then press the long seam flat with your fingertips, working from the centre outward so no air stays trapped against the filling.
Pinch each end between thumb and forefinger and twist in opposite directions — one clockwise, one anticlockwise — about a quarter turn each. Twisting both the same way unrolls the cylinder instead of sealing it.
The finished caramella should be about 42 mm long, with a flat body and two pointed ends, and it should sit on the tray without rolling. A caramella that rolls has not been twisted enough.
Cooking and the mint question
Three minutes at a bare simmer. Caramelle are compact, so they cook faster than their size suggests.
Add the mint to the filling at the last moment, or better, keep half of it back and scatter it raw over the finished plate. Cooked mint turns black and tastes of hay within a minute of hitting the pan.
Drying
Tray on semolina, twists pointing along the tray, 2 cm apart.
Air-dry 2 hours, turning once at 1 hour with a fish slice.
The twist holds best if the caramelle rest twist-side-down for the first 30 minutes.
Freeze on the tray, then bag — the twisted ends are the first thing to break, so bag them loose, not compressed.
Keeping Fridge 48 hours, freezer five weeks. Pack frozen caramelle loosely: pressed together in a bag, the twisted ends snap off and you end up with loose cylinders and a bag of crumbs.
When it goes wrong
Caramelle leak at the twists
Because Zucchini not squeezed hard enough, or the ends were not left clear of filling.
Do this Squeeze until the cloth stops dripping, and keep 15 mm of clean dough at both ends. A leak inside a twist cannot be repaired once it is cooked.
Twists untwist in the pot
Because Both ends twisted in the same direction, so the cylinder unrolled.
Do this One clockwise, one anticlockwise. Check the first three you make before committing to the whole batch.
Filling tastes of nothing
Because Zucchini overcooked in the pan, or not enough lemon zest.
Do this Four minutes in the pan, no more — the zucchini should still be pale green, not khaki. Add the zest to the ricotta, not to the pan.
Board & Pin
