Maultaschen

As tradition built it

Serves 4 to 6, makes about 12 large parcels. About 1½ hours.

Ingredients

• 400 g pasta flour (00 or strong white)
• 4 eggs
• a pinch pinch of salt
• 300 g fresh spinach, wilted and squeezed dry
• 250 g minced pork
• 150 g minced veal
• 100 g smoked bacon, finely diced
• 1 onion, finely diced and softened
• 100 g stale white bread, soaked in milk and squeezed
• 1 egg, for the filling
• 1 tsp dried marjoram
• to taste nutmeg, salt and pepper
• 1.5 litres good beef or vegetable stock, to poach and serve

Method

1. Make the pasta dough from the flour, eggs and salt; knead until smooth, wrap and rest 30 minutes. Roll out thinly and cut into roughly 12 cm squares.
2. Combine the spinach, pork, veal, bacon, softened onion, soaked bread, egg and marjoram; season generously with nutmeg, salt and pepper.
3. Place a spoonful of filling on each pasta square, brush the edges with water, fold into large rectangular parcels and press the edges firmly to seal.
4. Bring the stock to a bare simmer, not a boil, and poach the Maultaschen gently, 8 to 10 minutes, until the pasta is tender and the filling cooked through.
5. Serve in the broth (in der Brühe), or lift out, slice, and pan-fry with butter and egg until golden (geschmälzt), a traditional way of using up leftovers the next day.

What a modern chef changes

A hand-folded, deliberately imperfect seal, and a more precisely rendered filling

Rung 4

Method

1. Fold each parcel by hand with a slightly uneven pleat rather than crimping mechanically, the same principle as hand-scraped Spätzle: an irregular seal holds the poaching stock's flavour at its edges better than a machine-tight one.
2. Render the bacon separately and fold it through the filling off the heat, rather than leaving it raw to cook inside the parcel, for a more even distribution of smoke through the whole filling rather than pockets of it.
3. Poach sous vide at a held 82°C for 20 minutes instead of a stovetop simmer, for parcels that hold their shape with total consistency across a large batch, finishing briefly in hot stock only to warm the outside before serving.