So you’ve made this perfect pasta dough according to Michael White‘s precise specifications, and you’re asking yourself, “What am I going to do with all this beautiful, delicate pasta dough?” And the answer to that is, you’re going to pump it full of ricotta cheese, fold it into little pope hats, and douse it in the greenest, springiest pesto you’ve ever seen.
Once White has his pasta dough rolled impossibly thin and cut into squares, each square gets a little blop of ricotta that he’s whipped together with lemon zest, mascarpone, parmesan, and salt. It’s then sprayed with a little bit of water, and pinched first into triangles, then again to connect the corners.
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Those go on a sheet tray to hang out and party while he makes the pesto.
White starts his pesto with a huge batch of nettle leaves—nettles are a spring vegetable, in the same family as poison ivy, so handle them wearing gloves, and no, we don’t know who the first person who decided to try eating them was either—that he blanches in salty water to remove their sting. (If you can’t get nettles, he says spinach works too, and you’d want to give that a quick blanch as well.)
He mixes that with a bit of basil and starts pulsing it with garlic, walnuts, almonds, pecorino Romano, parmesan, salt, and black pepper.
Once it’s chopped to his liking, he starts streaming in olive oil—he prefers chilled olive oil, “to keep the pesto nice and green”—till it was perfectly chunky, but that still wasn’t quite right.
Because he’s Michael White and he’s soigné af, he scooped half of the pesto from the food processor into a high-powered blender, blitzed it silky-smooth, then folded it back into the food processor pesto to get that best-of-both-worlds texture.
MAKE THIS: Ricotta Pansotti
And then all that’s left is to drop the pansotti into boiling salted water, and scoop some pesto into a saute pan.
Once the pansotti rise to the surface, White scoops them into the pesto with a generous splash of pasta water and an even-more-generous chunk of butter, and swirls and tosses till it’s all emulsified. From there, it’s straight to a plate, with a microplaned shower of parmesan and walnut.
