Agnolotti

Agnolotti are the Piedmontese answer to stuffed pasta, and what defines them is the filling: cooked roast meat, usually a mix of beef, veal and pork braised with wine and vegetables, minced and bound with egg and grated Grana. Not ricotta, not spinach, not pumpkin.

There are two families. Classic agnolotti are square or rectangular, three to four centimetres across, and belong to the Monferrato hills. Agnolotti del plin are much smaller, two centimetres or less, and are sealed by pinching the dough between thumb and forefinger. Plin is Piedmontese dialect for pinch.

That pinch is functional, not decorative. It gives you a doubled edge and a paper-thin centre, and a ratio of filling to pasta that no stamped ravioli achieves. It is also why they are dressed with so little: any real sauce buries them.

The dish began as leftovers. Sunday's roast, minced on Monday, sealed in pasta on Tuesday: Piedmontese thrift in three moves.

Rich and meaty in a way that stuffed pasta rarely is. The filling tastes of browned roast meat and its pan juices, with the sweetness of slow-cooked onion and a savoury lift from the Grana; nutmeg sits underneath. There is no dairy softness because there is no ricotta.

The pasta itself is eggy and tender rather than chewy, because Piedmontese sfoglia carries more yolk than the Emilian version, and at plin size you get a burst of filling with each one rather than a mouthful of dough.

Dressed the traditional way, with roast juices or brown butter, the whole thing is intense but small-scale. Thirty tiny agnolotti add up to a rich plate, which is why portions look modest.

Cook them in plenty of well-salted water for two to three minutes, until they float plus about thirty seconds, and lift them out with a slotted spoon rather than tipping them into a colander, which breaks them.

Then dress them with almost nothing. The classic is sugo d'arrosto: the degreased pan juices from the roast that went into the filling, loosened with a ladle of pasta water. Second best is butter browned gently with a few sage leaves. Third, and traditional, is nothing at all: agnolotti al tovagliolo are served drained on a folded napkin, which absorbs the last of the water.

In the Langhe people eat plin with their fingers, straight off the napkin, as a pre-dinner snack with a glass of Barbera. That is genuinely a local habit, not a restaurant conceit.

Between October and December, the Alba version arrives under shavings of white truffle over butter. In winter, agnolotti in beef broth are the Christmas and Boxing Day plate.

What not to do: tomato sauce, cream, heavy ragù or the oven. All of them bury a pasta that is already seasoned from the inside.

Fresh agnolotti hold about two days in the fridge. Lay them in a single layer on a tray dusted with semolina, spaced apart, and cover them with a cloth rather than sealing them in a bag, where they give off moisture, soften at the contact points and stick together. Sealed shop packs carry their own printed date; once the pack is open, treat them as freshly made.

Freezing is the way to keep them longer, and it suits them. Spread them apart on a tray, freeze for an hour until firm, then transfer them to bags. They hold around two months, after which the edges of the pasta dry, crack and start to pick up freezer smells. Cook them straight from frozen, adding roughly a minute. Do not thaw first: the sheet releases water, the filling pulls away from it and they open in the pot.

Cooked and dressed they do not keep well. The next day they are better crisped in butter in a pan than put back into water.

In a serious pasta shop the plin look slightly irregular, because they are pinched shut by hand. Pieces that are all identical, with wide even borders, came out of a mould. The sheet should be a deep egg yellow and translucent enough that you can see the filling as a shadow when you hold one up to the light. Pale, opaque pasta means more white than yolk, or a semolina dough.

The filling is the real test. Break one open: it should be compact and brown, with the grain of the roasted meat still readable. A pale, smooth, paste-like filling has been bulked out with bread, potato or ricotta.

Abroad the name travels loosely. Refrigerated packs labelled agnolotti and filled with ricotta and spinach, or with four cheeses, are ravioli borrowing the word: the Piedmontese original is a meat pasta. Boxed dried agnolotti are a different product again. Expect fresh ones from an Italian pasta counter to cost several times what a supermarket tray does.

Fresh agnolotti travel badly, so outside Italy the practical options are a good Italian pasta shop or the freezer. In the US, Italian delis and fresh-pasta makers in most large cities carry meat-filled agnolotti at roughly $14–22 per pound; in the UK, Italian delicatessens and specialist online shops sell them frozen at £14–20 per kilo.

Read the filling on the pack. If it lists ricotta, spinach or breadcrumbs high up, it is a ravioli wearing the name. A proper filling reads beef, veal, pork, Grana or Parmigiano, egg, greens.

Frozen is usually better than 'fresh' packs with a long shelf life, which need stabilisers to get there. Cook them from frozen, adding a minute; do not thaw them first or they will burst.

The dough is worth judging by colour: deep yellow means yolks, pale means whites and water.

The Langhe and the Roero, around Alba, Barolo, La Morra, Neive and Barbaresco, are plin country. Nearly every trattoria makes its own, and the difference between them is in the filling. Alba's international white truffle fair runs from October into December and puts plin al tartufo on every menu in town.

The Monferrato hills around Asti and Alessandria are where the square agnolotti live, often served in broth and still associated with holidays in towns like Nizza Monferrato and Canelli.

Turin is the easiest place to compare the two in one evening: the old piole of the Quadrilatero and San Salvario serve both year-round, at prices a little above the countryside.

Autumn is the season: truffles, new wine, and weather that makes stuffed pasta make sense.