Agnolotti

I learned to make agnolotti from the grandmother of a family I stayed with in the Piedmont region of Italy, and they’re close to my heart. They’re the Piedmont version of ravioli; whoever figured them out really had it over whoever invented ravioli. They’re the perfect stuffed pasta, a brilliant design—a kind of self-sealing, self-defining package. They almost stuff themselves, sealing automatically when cut, and there’s never any problem with air pockets. It results in the perfect ratio of pasta to stuffing, there’s almost no wasted dough, and the size is consistent. I love their little pillow shape and the folds of the pasta that catch the sauce. Also, you can make a lot of them really fast. You just roll out a sheet of pasta, pipe out the filling, fold the dough over that cylinder, pinch the tube at one-inch intervals, then cut.