Meat Lover's Tortellini Skillet
Try this Meat Lovers Tortellini Skillet recipe, or contribute your own.
Try this Meat Lovers Tortellini Skillet recipe, or contribute your own.
- Carbohydrate 54.1484 g
- Cholesterol 9.52 mg
- Fat 8.0456 g
- Fiber 16.2399997234344 g
- Protein 8.004 g
- Saturated Fat 2.32522 g
- Serving Size 1 1 Serving (607g)
- Sodium 128.746666667112 mg
- Sugar 37.9084002765656 g
- Trans Fat 1.62904 g
- Calories 232 calories
Step-by-step
- Cook bacon in an oven safe skillet until browned and crispy. Remove bacon from skillet and drain on a paper towel lined plate. Leave about 2 tablespoons of bacon grease in the skillet and discard the rest.
- Saute the andouille sausage in the bacon grease over medium heat until browned (or if using ground sausage, brown in skillet, breaking up with wooden spoon until crumbled and cooked through). Carefully add the marinara sauce, water and tortellini to the skillet. Stir and bring to a low boil, reduce heat and cover for 7 to 10 minutes, or until the pasta is tender.
- Stir and then sprinkle the cheese over the top of the pasta in an even layer. Top with the sliced pepperoni and crumbled bacon. Cover and cook an additional 3 to 5 minutes, or until cheese is melted.
- If desired, place skillet under your oven's broiler for about 2 minutes to melt cheese even more. Enjoy!
Package labels fail to reveal how quickly starch absorbs liquid when scaling a pan-sauce recipe up or down. Doubling tortellini requires increasing the marinara and water at a strict 1:1 ratio to prevent the pasta from burning before the centers soften. Reducing quantities by half demands a smaller skillet diameter; excess surface area causes the cooking liquid to evaporate within four minutes rather than the required seven.
Visual cues dictate doneness here since thermometers cannot pierce small pasta shapes effectively. Raw tortellini floats initially, but cooked cheese-filled pasta becomes slightly translucent and yields to gentle pressure against the side of the pan with a wooden spoon at the seven-minute mark. Bubbles breaking slowly through the sauce indicate the correct simmer rate without scorching the bottom.
Broiling the final layer for exactly 120 seconds achieves bubbling mozzarella without toughening the pepperoni edges. Retaining two tablespoons of rendered bacon fat provides sufficient medium-heat conduction for browning the andouille or Italian sausage without adding extraneous oils.
