Lessons learned during the making of cannolis from scratch (Saturday, 14 October 2000) by Kelly J. Cooper:

Filling -

• Only one of the 15 or so recipes I pulled off the net recommended letting the ricotta cheese drain - but I would definitely recommend that one do this. If not, your filling will be droopy, difficult to handle, and it won't stay in the shell for long.

  (That recipe recommended putting the cheese in a colander & putting it in a container (in the fridge) that could hold at least a cup of fluid per 2 lbs/4 cups of cheese. I suspect that the addition of cheesecloth might be critical, as I'd guess that a good bit of ricotta would squeeze out the holes depending upon your colander. But, having not tried this yet, YMMV. I also can't speak to those recipes that recommended a mix of ricotta & marscapone cheese.)

• Get yrself a decent pastry bag (for squeezing the filling into the shells). Settling for a cheap frosting delivery system substitute may get you some clogging problems particularly if you're going to...

• ...Incorporate chocolate chips into the filling. Use either mini-chips or shred/shave a chocolate bar. Large chips or even smashed up chocolate tend to clog your filling delivery system.

• A secondary option (if your filling is stiff enough) might be the traditional dipping of the ends into chips or sprinkling the chips onto the filling-exposed bits. But again, smaller chips would be better.

• Proportions of cheese to sugar run about 1 cup ricotta (aka 1/2 lb.) to just under 1/4 cup sugar. Most recipes I have are for 20-40 servings and call for 2 lbs of ricotta and 1 3/4 cups sugar. 1 cup ricotta (plus the other ingredients in proportion) will make you 4-6 medium to small cannoli.

• Use regular sugar, not powdered sugar, to mix into the filling. (Mixing in powdered sugar tastes odd; but go with the powdered sugar sprinkled on top.)

• If using orange flower water for flavoring, seriously consider how orangey you like your food (and also note that orange-flavor is usually better with darker, more bitter chocolate). I ended up cutting my usage to 1/2 tsp. per cup of ricotta and also using 2 tsp. of vanilla to shift the orange to a nice bottom flavor. It was much tastier with the shell than just scooped up & taste-tested.

• One can't stress the importance of vanilla extract enough.

Shells -

• Buy the aluminum cannoli tubes - they really help.

• Getting the dough thin is important. The dough tends to be elastic, so you may find yourself rolling out each piece again just before cooking it.

• Only one recipe actually told us the depth of oil to use in cooking - 2-3 inches. Definitely go with around 3 inches. The weight of the tube causes the dough/tube combo to sink under the surface, but the overlap of dough is heavy & will always roll to the bottom. You can't exactly hold it in a different orientation while it cooks, so if the oil's not deep enough, the dough sticking out (as it puffs up) above the surface of the oil won't cook through.

• A big slotted spoon (the wide kind that allow you to pull peking ravioli out of hot oil) works better than a dipping basket for the deep frying.

• The crucial thing about wrapping the dough around the tube is the SEAL (using egg white), not the tightness. The tube is there to maintain the form for a few seconds - if the dough is wrapped a bit loosely, then the hot oil can get between the dough and the tube and actually fully cook your shell. (The shell will swell to fit snugly around the tube.)

• If your dough isn't thin and you've wrapped it too tightly around the tube, it'll be chewy & uncooked in the center and damn near impossible to get off the freakin' tube. However, if you rolled it thin & wrapped it loosely but it's still not fully cooked, you may be using too much dough. We found that ovals were easy to work with but left us with too much dough overlapping, creating a thick area that didn't cook completely through. Trimming to a more diamond-like shape helped some; trimming the tips off the diamond just before wrapping also helped. (But don't trim so much that you have nothing left to overlap.)

• Handling the tubes: (1) Tongs work well to pull the tubes out of the shells (2) don't wait more than 5 minutes for cooling to pull the tubes out (3) angle the tube down/away from you and onto some paper towels as you remove it because residual oil will still be hot enough to burn you.

• Most recipes recommend a 1-minute or until-golden-brown cooking time. If yr dough is thin, loosely wrapped and trimmed down then 25 seconds may be too long. The dough really does blister as advertised.

• We liked using Marsala in the dough, but other recipes recommend dessert wine or a mixture of white vinegar & water. Still others flavor the dough. We highly recommend experimenting with various recipes.

  Kelly J. Cooper

  p.s. Recipes we used to create our version:

• http://w3.one.net/~proicer/archives/8May1998.html
• http://recipes.alastra.com/pastries/cannoli01.html
  ...inclusive...
  
• http://recipes.alastra.com/pastries/cannoli12.html
• http://www.ichef.com/ichef-recipes/Desserts/2166.html
• http://www.caro.net/~joespa/m2m/recipes/cannoli.htm

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