The Old-School Stuffed Italian Pasta That Hardly Anyone In The US Remembers Today

Stuffed pasta goes far beyond ricotta and spinach filled tortellini or cheese ravioli at your local Italian restaurant. There are tons more stuffed pasta dishes you should know about, including the Sardinian classic, culurgiones. Sardinia is an Italian island with a long history of culturally diverse influences represented by a unique list of culinary specialties. Culurgiones are an ode to the wheat harvest and so the pasta dough is fashioned to look like wheat spikelets. The dish is traditionally consumed in Sardinia to celebrate the end of the durum wheat harvest, a major crop on the island and, of course, the key ingredient in most types of pasta.

While stuffed pasta is nothing new in Italy, culurgiones distinguish themselves from more well-known stuffed pasta varieties by the dough ingredients, formation, and cooking method. Whereas most pasta dough is a mixture of 00 flour and eggs, culurgione dough consists simply of salted water and semolina flour made from durum wheat. Furthermore, the formation of the stuffed pasta is more akin to making a dumpling. They're filled with mashed potato, garlic, mint, and pecorino Romano. Our culurgiones recipe adapted from one by chef Adam Leonti explains how to form the wheat ear shapes by pressing and pinching the dough methodically with your fingers. 

It's likely that culurgiones didn't catch on in the U.S. partly due to a slightly labor-intensive cooking process compared to ravioli and tortellini, but also because of the niche Sardinian island origin from where fewer U.S. immigrants originated.

Culurgiones may seem obscure here in the U.S., where there aren't too many Sardinian-specific restaurants, but they're definitely an underrated pasta dish that you should try for your next home-cooked Italian dinner. Most traditional recipes serve them smothered in a simple tomato sauce, but variations abound. Regional options in Sardinia swap the filling of potatoes, garlic, mint, and cheese for simply cheese and potatoes or cheese, onions, and potatoes. In Southern Sardinia, potatoes are replaced entirely by ricotta blended with an egg for added richness. Some culurgione recipes call for lemon or orange zest to bring a citrus kick to the minty, savory filling.

If you're making culurgiones from scratch, you have the ultimate power of customization. Swap the usual tomato sauce for a decadent yet still simple brown butter sauce, for example — as in our recipe. Or let the minty flavor of the filling really shine by serving culurgiones in our 5-minute almond mint pesto. You can also draw inspiration from this sweet potato ravioli recipe by swapping Yukon Gold potatoes for a sweeter root veggie like sweet potatoes or butternut squash. Sweet potato culurgiones would work especially well with a brown butter and sage sauce. For a truly simple and fresh idea, just toss the culurgiones in an aglio e olio sauce and a hearty sprinkling of extra pecorino Romano cheese, with a final squeeze of bright lemon juice.