Chlorophyll Pasta Stuffed with Foraged Greens

We went foraging on Montjuïc recently and had more greens than we needed. I've been meaning to try extracting chlorophyll to make green pasta again, and this was a great opportunity. After extracting, I had the left over vegetable pulp and used it to make a spanakopita-like stuffing for the pasta. It turned out really well, and I'd do it again.  I'm putting all the techniques here because I managed to nail the proportions of filling to pasta. 

This makes enough for dinner for two, with an extra batch of pasta, and some left over vegetable pulp. Measurements are flexible. 

Chlorophyll pasta filled with greens, with an anchovy butter sauce

Extract Chlorophyll

I've been able to greatly simplify the Chlorophyll extraction based on the French Laundry technique we used in 2004: you don't have to shock it and wait two days for the straining; you can do it at the moment. 

I got 28.5 g Chlorophyll from my greens, a 12% yield, which is within the range I got from the French Laundry technique, but it all depends on what greens you have. We had plantain leaf, wild chard, dandelion leaves, goosefoot, and probably some others -- each has a different amount of Chlorophyll.

235 g  Wild Greens

500 ml Water

Chop the Wild Greens and add to a blender with the Water.

Whiz thoroughly for a couple minutes -- I don't think you can over-blend this.

Strain through a fine strainer and squeeze all the green liquid into a pot; 

save the vegetable pulp for the filling.

Bring the green water to about 70C / 160F while stirring: you'll see the Chlorophyll start to precipitate out of the solution and flocculate into clumps.

Stir any Chlorophyll that's stuck to the bottom of the pot into the water.

Let it hang out a while, stirring occasionally to get as much Chlorophyll to precipitate as possible.

Strain through a very fine mesh filter: I used a reusable plastic mesh coffee filter, but a paper filter works well too.

Keep the Chlorophyll that's trapped in the filter.

Make the Pasta Dough

Our usual combination is 1 Egg to 100 g Flour for two people, half the typical Italian amount but it's enough for us. You'll need to adjust depending on the size of your Eggs and how wet your Chlorophyll is. I use a food processor but you can use a bowl and your muscles. We always make a double batch, and freeze half the finished dough for later. 

Half of the below makes enough for for the two of us us when filled and sauced.

 100 g      Flour

 100 g      Semolina Flour

            Salt

28.5 g      Chlorophyll, from above

   2 large  Eggs

Combine the dry ingredients in a food processor and whiz briefly to combine. 

Add the Chlorophyll and Eggs, and whiz on low speed.

The dough should come together into a collection of large crumbs;

Helen Rennie's YouTube video shows this well.

If it coalesces into a tight ball, it's a too wet, so add some Flour and whiz again;

if it remains powdery, add some Water and whiz some more.

Scoop the crumbly dough out onto a counter and knead into a tight ball:

it shouldn't be too sticky nor too stiff.

Cover in plastic and refrigerate until it's time to roll and stuff; freeze any extra.

Assemble the Filling

I was thinking of spanakopita: spinach, feta, and egg; a bit of lemon wouldn't have been out of place. You can use whatever you like.

This was just the right amount for our two-person, half recipe of dough from above. 

  1 large  Egg

100 g      Wild Greens Pulp, from above

100 g      Feta Cheese

           Nutmeg

           Salt

           Pepper

Whip the Egg so it's pretty uniform, and add the rest of the ingredients.

Whiz in the food processor you used above (no need to clean it) or combine well with a fork.

It shouldn't be soggy, nor dry and crumbly.

Roll and Fill the Pasta

I've been using an Atlas manual pasta roller for decades and have a feel for the dough, how much to fold to get the width right, etc. For stuffed pasta, the sheets need to be pretty thin, so you probably can't use a wine bottle like you can for strands. The Pasta Grannies make it look easy, but if you can roll thinly with a rolling pin, you're a better pasta maker than I will ever will be.

Cut the Dough in to 4 pieces and keep the ones you're not working with covered in the plastic film so they don't dry out.

Feed the dough through the widest setting (#0) to flatten, fold into thirds, and re-feed in the perpendicular direction. Repeat this a few times to laminate the dough. It should be almost as wide as the roller, but will  widen as you thin it next.

Dust both sides of the flattened dough with Flour.

Reduce the width of the rollers to the next setting (#1) and feed the dough through once.

Reduce again, and repeat.

Repeat until you're at the thinnest setting for stuffed pasta (#9 on my machine).

Unlike for strands, don't let the Pasta wait and dry out at all: stuff immediately so it adheres to itself without cracking.

I decided to make Agnolotti, which is like Ravioli with an extra flap. I suggest watching this YouTube Short, it's quite clear. Agnolotti filled with a soft filling is easy to pinch and seal; my filling is more stiff, which prevents sealing, so I dolloped small dots over the length. Instead of sealing the long edge, I found I could press out more air by first sealing between each dollop, then seal the long edge. Then cut, and seal each edge again to be sure.

Boil, Sauce, and Serve

Boil the filled Pasta in salted water until the dough is tender but still a little toothsome, about 5 minutes for my batch.

Sauce as you like: Irene made a simple but lusty anchovy and butter sauce which went well.

We used a strainer to transfer the cooked Pasta with a bit of its starchy water to the Sauce. Gently fold into the Sauce to coat. 

Serve.

This stood up well to a full-bodied red wine.

Jacque Pepin's deboned chicken, lollipops

I discovered this video of Jacque Pepin fully deboning a chicken and it blew me away: so fast, so efficient. We did this for a ballotine (chicken stuffed with duck and pheasant) and it took us a long time boning the birds -- tons of detailed knife-work. When Jacques said,  "it should not take you much more than a minute to bone out a chicken" I new we had to try it; I really like that he said, "the biggest mistake is to use the knife very much".

We don't have any photos of the boning process. It took us considerably more than a minute. But the technique is great and we'll get faster as we practice. The chicken wing "lollipops" were a fun by-product.

Below is the chicken, stuffed, and trussed with butcher's twine ready for the oven.

We roasted it until the internal temperature was about 145F/63C, rotating it a couple times near the end to ensure the skin was crispy all around.

We sliced it and had a fairly well behaved roll of chicken enclosing stuffing, and crispy skin.  Next time we might try adding some intensely flavored sausage to the filling.

I'll have to update this post when we do this again to show the deboning and stuffing, and the finished slices.

We saved the chicken wing lollipops (do watch the video, it's right at the beginning) and then dusted them with flour, fried them in oil until crisp, then briefly draining them.

We served it for breakfast with some migas (a southwestern hash of crisp tortilla chips with scrambled eggs)  garnished with pomegranates.

Chlorophyll Extraction for Green Pasta and Sauces (2004)

I did this back in September 2004 but wanted to document it here, it worked really well. The different greens had different extraction rates and flavors: basil tasted the best but was most expensive, chard was cheap and easy to extract. See another recipe here for using the chlorophyll to make green pasta which retains its flavor when cooked.

This extraction technique is from Thomas Keller's The French Laundry Cookbook. Keller uses two parts spinach and one part each parsley and watercress and uses it in herb sauces and cream sauces.

Note: this takes two days to make.

Below are various yields for different Greens, deveined or destemmed.

Weights are after washing, still a bit dripping wet.

The Chard had the best yield and was easiest to extract.

The Basil chlorophyll had a surprising pepper taste, with some anise.

Greens      Source  Pulp   Chloro   Yield  Notes

Swiss Chard 12 oz   2 C    5oz=9Tb  52%    Good separation, fast filtering

Sorrel      1 Lb   2 C    1oz=3Tb   6%    Fine grain difficult to tell separation;

                                           filtering is very slow

Basil      6 oz   5 floz 1oz=3Tb  17%    Brown run-off water

Grind greens in a meat grinder (Kitchenaid mixer attachment with fine cutter).

Add at least four times as much water as ground greens by volume.

Let soak in refrigerator overnight.

Strain through medium mesh sieve, squeezing out as much liquid as possible,

allowing chlorophyll-laden water to pass through into pan (a shiny rather than dark pan is easier to see).

Bring to simmer, stirring constantly; watch for chlorophyll to precipitate out of solution.

When fully separated, shock by adding just enough ice to cool it down, but not so many there are floating ice cubes in the pan.

Strain through coffee filter set inside a colander; this may take overnight, so you can set it up in the fridge.

What's left on the filter is pure chlorophyll which can be scraped off and saved tightly covered in the freezer.

For Pasta, we use 3 Tbs chlorophyll to 2 C fine durum Flour, 3 Eggs, 1 Tbs milk.

Next time... In 2023, I no longer have a meat grinder; would whizzing the greens with some of the water in a food processor or blender work? I expect it would have the same effect of breaking the leaves to open up the cells.