The canederli are here!

Canederli, like many other dishes of the peasant tradition, were born of the practical need to put to good use ingredients that would have otherwise gone to waste, such as days-old bread, which was combined with other ingredients like luganega sausage or speck, cheeses and vegetables.

Here is the recipe that you can easily try at home to prepare your canederli in broth! 

First, you need to prepare a good broth

For 3 litres of vegetable broth, you need a courgette, a potato, a clove of garlic, two carrots, two onions, two tomatoes and three celery sticks. If you like, you can also add a few bay leaves and some peppercorns.

Wash the vegetables thoroughly, peel and halve the carrots after removing the two ends, then peel and halve the onions. Break the celery stalks into three parts and chop the courgettes. Peel and cut the potato into four wedges, and peel the two tomatoes.

Place a pot with three litres of cold water on the fire and add all the vegetables at once, followed by bay leaf, black peppercorns and unpeeled garlic clove.

Bring to a boil, add salt and a little parsley. Close with a lid and let it cook for about an hour and a half. At the end, add salt as needed, and filter the broth through a sieve.

Now we move on to preparing our canederli! 
 

Ingredients

• 4 stale buns
• 2 whole eggs 
• 1 lucanica sausage 
• 1 small slice of speck 
• 2 glasses of milk
• 1 sprig of chopped parsley (or chives)
• 250 g of breadcrumbs 
• 100 g of Trentingrana cheese
• salt and pepper
• flour as needed

Preparation
Dice the buns and soak them in milk. Soak them thoroughly with your hands, then add eggs, diced lucanica sausage and speck,  cheese, salt and pepper and, lastly, parsley. 

Mix everything with your hands, then let the mixture rest in a covered container for half an hour. Then add breadcrumbs. 

Wet your hands and turn the mixture into “meatballs” of the same size. 
Your canederli are now ready to be cooked in the broth you prepared!
Cook in boiling broth for about 15 minutes. Serve in bowls with broth and Trentingrana flakes. 

To make sure that the canederli are of the right consistency, first dip just one of them in the broth: if it breaks, add a little flour to the dough.