Cannelloni & Manicotti - Is there a difference?
Just wondering - Is there a difference between Cannelloni & Manicotti?
kevinj
Sep 22, 2005 09:50AM
4 Replies so Far
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When I make cannelloni, I put spinach and a little liver in besides the cheese. Personally, I use crepes for the manicotti, and a very thin pasta dough with egg whites for the cannelloni. Manicotti I serve with just red sauce and cannelloni with a combo of red and bechemel. Manicotti takes about a half hour to throw together, and the cannelloni takes about 3 hours.
OK, so this is all how I do it at home, maybe it's not the same story elsewhere. But with me they are very different.
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Same class, different dress. Both are filled and sauced tubes of dough--either a crepe-like batter or a basic pasta dough. In our Southern Italian family, manicotti shells were usually made with a crepe-like batter, one at a time.
The stuffings diverge: manicotti is more commonly served with a basic ricotta (plus herb or spinach) filling, topped with tomato sauce or ragu and briefly baked, sometimes with mozzarella on top. Cannelloni serve a more formal role--stuffings are often meat-based with lots of ingredients, topped with bechamel and cheese and some other sauce, baked longer. Cannelloni used to flourish from Emilia-Romagna north, while manicotti have been at the heart of the Neapolitan festa tradition.
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when my father would make them (usually at the same time as he would just make the crepes in one large batch), cannelloni were meat and spinach (together) filled while manicotti was ricotta filled. we always used the same tomato sauce on both. have always been more of a manicotti fan myself. but love the meat and spinach mixture when he would use it for stuffed mushrooms.
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I've typically had cannelloni stuffed with finely ground veal in thinner shell in a cream sauce and manicotti stuffed with ricotta in a thicker shell in red gravy.
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