Methocel Cannelloni

What do you get when you order cannelloni? You know at one point the pasta was wrapped around some hopefully delicious filling usually containing ricotta, covered in red or white sauce, cheese, then baked in those cheesy oval dishes. And 9 times out of 10, 40-60% of the filling becomes part of the sauce when it oozes out of the pasta. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with grandma's home style cannelloni but when we serve it we need to refine it a bit and bring it up to date. I really wanted to produce a nontraditional cannelloni, no ricotta, not drowned in red sauce, and a filling that actually holds so it looks decent on the plate. I started with some braised wagyu shortrib scrap that was cooked down with chive, shallot, and braising liquid. I could have easily made ravioli and called it a day but was focused on cannelloni for some reason. I took some shallot and garlic, sweat that, add thyme, add truffle juice and reduce, add chicken jus and reduce, then cream
and reduce again. The truffle cream was pureed and passed then I proceeded to add the methocel

16g SGA 7M methocel
205g water
1000g truffle cream

after hydrating the methocel in the water and adding it to the truffle cream I cooled it in an ice bath. You can see the consistency below.




I folded the cooled truffle cream into the braised short rib.





Rolled it out in plastic wrap then put it in the freezer for 20 minutes so I could slice portions.



I rolled out pasta, blanched and oiled long sheets, then laid them out on the table. I cut them the same width of the shortrib filling, brushed them with a little egg yolk, then cut the pasta and rolled up the filling.



Instead of drowning the pasta in sauce we put a ladle full of chicken stock on a sizzle platter then microplaned alot of tarentaise cheese over the top and baked them, pulling the cannelloni out midway to baste with the stock. Here is the result. Just enough methocel to hold the filling, a rich dish but the texture was light and complimented the pasta nicely. I ended up double rolling the cannelloni with pasta for a higher pasta to filling ratio that I thought was necessary.




Here is a close up of the sous vide scallop and cannelloni that completed the dish.



In the end it was
wagyu shortrib cannelloni...scallop, parsnip, tarentaise, foraged mushroom viniagrette, blue tuscan kale





It doesn't get much colder than it is right now in Orlando so this dish was designed to be hearty, filling, and comfort food with a twist.