This is another very popular recipe in Italy 🙂

It takes a while to make it, but it’s quite simple and not difficult at all.

Remember to buy enough spinach, because once you cook/boil them, very little remains 🙂

Once again, instead of ricotta I used an artisanal Orda, which is very similar and it’s a local product I can find here in Hungary.

For the pasta, it’s possible to make it also with prepared pasta, but with homemade pasta is much better.

Let’s see how to make it!

INGREDIENTS (4-5 people):

For the cannelloni (12 pieces):

• 300 g flour
• 3 eggs

For the filling:

• 300 g of cooked and squeezed spinach (count at least 800-900 g of fresh spinach)
• 500 g of ricotta (I used local orda)
• freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano
• salt

For the sauce:

• 750 ml of tomato sauce
• 1 onion
• extra virgin olive oil
• salt
• freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano

For the bechamel  sauce:

• 50 g butter
• 50 g flour
• 550 ml milk
• salt
• freshly ground nutmeg

1. First prepare the cannelloni, it’s the usual homemade pasta I did other times, for example read HERE. The dough has to rest 30 minutes.
2. Meanwhile cook the spinach in a large pan, with some extra virgin olive oil and a clove of garlic, for 5-6 minutes. Then let to cool down and squeeze them from all the water. Then cut them into very small pieces, and then mix in a bowl together with the ricotta and freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano (at your taste, 60-70 g are enough).
3. Now take a pan, heat some oil, add the onion chopped into small pieces, and when it’s soft add the tomato sauce and reduce it until is thick enough. Season with salt if needed.
4. Now prepare the cannelloni. Flatten the dough and then cut it into big rectangles, of the same largeness of the oven pan you are going to use to bake them. Then boil the pasta for few seconds, 10-15 seconds, and keep it aside, on a towel, to cool down enough.
5. Then place the ricotta-spinach filling on the side of the cannelloni pasta and then simply roll the pasta. Ready 🙂
6. Now prepare the Béchamel sauce: take a pot and melt the butter at low heat, then sift the flour and add it all in one time to the butter, remove the pot from the heat and keep whisking with a manual whisker until you obtain an homogeneous blond Roux, with no lumps, and bring the pot back to the heat for a couple of minutes. Then add the milk, keep mixing, then add the salt and the grated nutmeg, and keep mixing energetically until the sauce starts to boil and becomes thicker and creamy, with no lumps at all.
7. Now take an oven pan and first spread some tomato sauce and bechamel sauce on the bottom. Then place the cannelloni next to each other. Then add tomato sauce on the top, then again bechamel sauce and for last a generous amount of freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano, to cover the whole dish: it will make a nice crust 🙂
8. Bake at 200 °C, fan-assisted mode, for about 20 minutes.
9. Let it cool down some minutes, and then enjoy it 🙂

PS: if something remains, it’s very good also the day after 🙂