Today we are going to explain how to prepare the cannoli, which are a typical sicilian sweet. We are now visiting Stefano, a Chef from Taormina, to see how he prepares his cannoli.
The first thing you need to do is tip the flour onto the counter, make a well in the center, or, as Chef Stefano called it, make a volcano and then add the egg into the center like the lava.
(The recipe quantities on the how to cook that sweet is right down this article)
Add the cinnamon and the sugar. Now mix that together using your hands. He was very specific about not using a mixer to do this story because you might over mix it, which will mean it won’t have any bubbles on the cannoli when it’s cooked. Keep rubbing it together and then add in the slightly melted butter and again, use your hands to mix it in until it’s evenly distributed. Add in a little red wine at a time to moisten it so that it can form a dough. Traditionally, you’d use Marsala for this, but red wine works just as well if you can’t get hold of Marsala. Keep pressing and folding and need your dough for a few minutes until it’s smooth. And even we got to try so many desserts while we were travelling through Italy. Like gelato, of course. Cassata to Rhone, which we call nougat here.
Sweet Tella, which I’d never had before, but the layers in that were amazing. And of course, tiramisu. I feel like Australia doesn’t have dessert recipe inventions of our own that we can claim. We have things like pavlova and even lamingtons, but both of those have now been claimed by New Zealand. They said they made them both first. Australia did invent lawnmowers and wi fi. WI fi is pretty important to people all over the world. So that’s a big one for sweet food though.
We can lay claim to Tim Tams, and that’s a good one. It’s a very popular chocolate biscuit here, which I think most of you should be able to get all around the world now. And you could have it as a dessert if you have it as a Tim Tam slam. If you haven’t had a Tim Tam slam before, what you do is bite off the opposite corners of the Tim Tam and then use it like a straw for a hot drink, like hot chocolate or coffee, or you can use cold drink, but I find it works better with hot can quickly slam it in your mouth before it drops into your drink. Oh yeah, the whole thing just liquefies. It does. That’s a good way to describe it. Is that just a liquid? Tim Tam? The whole thing just becomes melted in your mouth. Melted chocolate, soft biscuit, the melted filling, it just implodes. You have to shove it in fast.
Hence the name the Tim Tam slam. Matthew can do a double Tim Tam slam where he has two Tim Tams and slams them both at once. I can’t do that. I’d love to see if any of you can do a triple slam, but if you haven’t tried it before, try it with one. Tim Tam first. It might be a bit much otherwise.
Again, Chef Stefano insisted that if you don’t rest your dough, you won’t have bubbles on the outside of your cannoli when you fry it. And bubbles are a sign of good cannoli. We’re going to make two different fillings. And the first one you need five egg yolks and you mix with that a little bit of milk and 140 grams of sugar and whisk that together really well. Add a little bit of grated lime rind. Matt is doing a great job there and the rind of a whole orange then push a hole in the orange and squeeze. It really had to get most of the juice out, then whisk through the semolina flour a little at a time until it’s all incorporated. Put the rest of the milk in a frying pan on medium heat until it just starts to boil, then pour in the egg yolk mixture into the center and wait until you see bubbles again. And then mix it and keep stirring it. Don’t stop stirring it until it’s thick and even all the way through you can taste it to check if it’s good, which it was very good.
Then tip that into a bowl and cool it in the fridge for the second feeling. You just whisk together ricotta and sugar and then add in candied fruits and mix them through. Now back to our cannoli. Take your rested cannoli dough and roll it out on some semolina flour. You want it fairly thin and then cut out a circle of the dough and roll it even thinner. Turn it as you roll it. So you try and keep it fairly circular, keep rolling until it’s thin enough that you can see the silhouette of your fingers through the dough, Then wrap the dough around a cannoli tube and seal it at the joint using a little bit of egg. Then you just need to fry them in oil. If you’re using metal canola tubes, they’re going to sink to the bottom. So you need to hold them off the bottom so that they don’t burn just using your drainer and give it a little bit of a wriggle as they cook. Once they’re ready, make sure you tip it before you take it off the pan to let the oil that’s inside the tubes drain out. Otherwise you’re going to get oil everywhere and then just put that on some paper towel to drain off the excess oil. See how the cannoli shells have bubbles all over them. As I said, that is apparently the sign of a good cannoli. Wait for them to cool off and then just slide the tube out of the middle, check the inside to make sure it’s cooked all the way through. If not, you can just fry them for a couple more seconds. But these ones look good. You can use a spoon to.
Embedded is much easier with a piping bag, then dip each end in pistachio nuts or almonds or chocolate chips or whatever you like, really. And then you just serve them on a plate and it’s important that you eat them within 3 hours of filling them because otherwise they go soggy and they’re not good. You want that only to be crunchy so you can store the shells in an airtight container and fill them just before serving. Did you think of that, ma’am? That was a good cause. He was very nice. He was lovely. And it was so amazing to make it and to have someone who makes 100 of these every day. They’re teaching you and telling you all the secrets and especially the secrets of they use the scraps to make. I can’t remember how you pronounce it. They just said like little biscuits for the staff because you can’t reroll it because it then has a mixture of the semolina flour. So they pour hot Nutella over the top and make little biscuits. Tastes really good. Taste amazing.
Italian Cannoli Recipe
250g (8.82 ounces) of 00 flour
1 egg
1 tsp cinnamon
50g (1.76 ounces) sugar
50 butter slightly meted
30-50mL (1.69 fluid ounces) marsala or red wine
Semolina flour for rolling
cannoli tubes for frying and a skimmer for holding the cannoli off the bottom of the pan.
Italian chef cannoli recipe
Filling Option 1: Ricotta
500g (17.64 ounces) Ricotta
200g (7.05 ounces) sugar
45g (1.59 ounces) candied dried fruits (you can swap this for flakes of chocolate or what you like, be inventive)
Filling Option 2: Crema Bianca
625mL (21.13 fluid ounces) milk
5 egg yolks
140g (4.94 ounces) sugar
50g (1.76 ounces) semolina flour
grated rind of 1/2 a lime
grated rind of one orange
squeeze of orange juice
For decorating the ends:
chopped almonds
chopped pistachios
small chocolate chips or chopped chocolate
You can’t re-roll the dough because the semolina flour is on the outside. But you can fry up the scraps and drizzle with warm Nutella.