Tortellini en brodo is a tiny stuffed pasta from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. Photo: Lucy Ridge.
The term “hidden gem” is often bandied about, but St Elmo at Torrens shops fits the bill. It’s an understated local coffee shop with great house-baked treats, but it’s also so much more. Did you know they make the most incredible handmade pasta?
St Elmo is bang in the middle of amphitheatre-shaped Torrens Shops (low-key one of the cuter old shopping centres in Canberra). A few tables and a vintage green vinyl four-seater are scattered out the front, and a few folks are waiting for their coffees in the Autumn sun.
I’ve popped into St Elmo on several occasions over the years for coffee and a baked treat, but I’m visiting today for a special dish: tortellini en brodo. This dish hails from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy and is made with very small pasta parcels filled with pork sausage and mortadella, swimming in a clear broth soup. It’s a dish I fell in love with at age 18 in the city of Modena (also the home of balsamic vinegar), but I can’t recall having it since.
Tortellini are highly labour-intensive as you need to make so many for each serving. Most restaurants choose to serve ravioli or tortellini’s big brother, tortelloni, instead (the difference is in the suffix: -ini means ‘small’ while -oni means ‘large’).
But while bed-rotting and scrolling Instagram on a lazy Saturday morning, I spied St Elmo’s post: they were serving a limited amount of tortellini en brodo that day. It was enough to catapult me out of bed and into the car.
Arriving around 11 am (yes, it had been a very lazy morning), I saw that the baked goods on the counter were all sold out, with empty plates echoing the ghosts of focaccia and canelé. However, I breathed a sigh of relief to see that the dish of my desire was still available. One tortellini en brodo, please (and a coffee … I really needed a coffee).
Like everything at St Elmo, the dish arrived in a cardboard takeaway container, but this did not mar my enjoyment one bit.
Chef Trav describes making pasta as “a conversation between you, the flour, the yolks and the room”, and I love how I can see the handmade quirks of this process. The ring on each tortellini is exactly the size and shape of the chef’s pointed finger as they loop the pasta around and press it tight to seal. This is connection through food, and I can taste the care in each bite.
St Elmo also sells homemade lasagna and other pastas to take home. Photo: Lucy Ridge.
Each pasta parcel bursts with flavour, the broth is clean and hearty, and there’s a shimmer of tarragon butter on the surface. Sipping it in the sun is divine.
I also picked up a box of fresh mafaldine pasta and a jar of lamb ragu sauce to take home to cook for another day. The pasta is made with free-range eggs and Australian flour, and extruded through a brass die (which gives it a deliberately rough texture), and the slow-cooked ragu is full of shredded lamb shoulder and tiny meatballs. It’s an affordable way to treat yourself at home or impress dinner guests.
When I cook it up the next day for dinner, the pasta is silky and chewy, and its texture lets the delicious sauce cling to the ruffled strands. There was also a small retail shelf selling coffee, boutique olive oil and other goodies. You can eat very well off purchases at St Elmo.
Malfaldine pasta is extruded through a brass die, which creates texture for the sauce to cling to. Photo: Lucy Ridge.
The tortellini was a special event, but everything at St Elmo is handmade with excellent care, and I’d be happy to return for any of their regular pasta dishes. And next time, I’ll arrive early enough to snaffle some of their baked goods, too.
St Elmo is located at Shop 9 / 16 Torrens Place, Torrens. They are open from 8 am to 2 pm, Wednesday to Sunday. You can also preorder their retail pasta. Follow St Elmo on Instagram.
Original Article published by Lucy Ridge on Region Canberra.
