Cooking Pasta for Cannelloni

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to show you a really nice, quick, easy way to make cannelloni. So, my water is boiling--be careful, watch out for that steam. So I'm just going to go ahead and take the shells--and you really want to drop them in one at a time, and we're going to let these go for about six minutes from the time I get all of them in there. Which is going to be a second, it would appear--get in there. And if they don't all submerge right away, don't worry. What will happen is, in a second, as they start to soften up, they'll start to sink. Just try to get them fairly submerged. So I'm going to set my timer here for seven minutes. I'm going to throw a lid back on them, because that will also help get the ones that aren't completely submerged, it will help steam them on top until they actually do submerge. So we're going to go here for seven minutes. In seven minutes we're going to come back here and strain these. In the meantime, we are going to finish working on prepping up for our sauce. Next, we're going to cut up our--or chop up, I should say, our whole tomatoes--our peeled tomatoes, but first we want to drain them. So I'm going to take these to the sink and drain them real quick, and I will be right back. So our pasta's done, so I'm just going to bring it over here and carefully dump it in the colander, and then what I will do is I will start running cold water over it to shock it, or cool it off quickly. And chances are, we're probably going to lose a tube or two, just because of the--sometimes they break, it's not the end of the world. Something else you can do to cool them off faster, is you can return them to the pot you were cooking them in, but just run cold water in the pot, and just kind of soak them in cold water for a second. You can also pick them up like this and rinse them off one at a time, but be careful, they will be hot. Then by soaking them in water, they will remain pliable, which is always not a terrible idea. Because if they harden, they're going to become really, really hard to deal with. Actually, they'll become inordinately difficult to deal with. So let's go ahead, get some water in this pan--it's just cold water. Enough to cover them, and we'll just set this off to the side and let them kind of sit in this water--it's only going to be a few minutes. I wouldn't advise doing this if you were doing this a long time in advance, but since we're talking about basically five or ten minutes, it won't hurt anything. So, let's get back to dicing up tomatoes."