A while back, knowing I was a foodie, my friend recommended me to watch “Big Night“, a movie from 1996 about two Italian brothers, one chef, one manager, trying to make their restaurant work in America.
The movie was a lot about food, and one of the dish showcased in the movie was Timpano — a baked pasta dish that looked amazingly stunning and interesting, decided to test the recipe.
In my opinion, Timpano is best described as a pasta cake: an outer pasta sheet encasing more pasta, meatballs, salami, eggs, cheese and sauce.
I consult 2 recipes: one from New York Times and one from Food Network.
Initial glance at the recipes looked so daunting, with many elements to make from scratch: outer pasta skin, meatballs, sauce; I settled with store bought meat balls and tomato sauce to save some time for this test of concept, and I made half the recipe in case of disaster.
Outer pasta dough was easy to put together (I used the New York Times dough recipe), but was not easy to make thin — specially I am not a pro in dough-making. Continue reading →