Timpano

Peanut and I throw a holiday party for all our friends each year, where we make way too much food, play board games, and usually end up spilling alcohol everywhere. This year, we decided to try our hand at making a dish that utterly defies reason and logic: timpano.

I first learned of timpano from this Binging with Babish video, which I imagine you’ve already seen. Here’s the basic recipe:

  1. Roll out a just absurdly large circle of pasta dough, and line the inside of a dutch oven with it.
  2. Fill it with absolutely every Italian dish you’ve ever heard of.
  3. Bake it, flip it, and serve it.

Timpano traditionally has hard boiled eggs in it, but that sounded weird and gross to us, so we decided on the following layers:

Layer one: rigatoni, on a bed of provolone cheese, painstakingly organized so they are all more or less facing the same direction.
Layer two: eggplant parmesan, because one of our guests was a vegetarian.
Layer three: Peanut’s homemade meatballs, which include tiny bits of carrots.
Layer four: fresh mozzarella.
Layer five: shells stuffed with ricotta and spinach.
Layer six: chicken parmesan.
Layer seven: hot Italian sausage, peppers and mushrooms.
Layer eight: salami and freshly grated parmesan cheese.

We folded all that up and baked all 38 lbs. of food for about an hour, and this was the result:

Glorious. Delicious. Utterly decadent.

There was a really loud THUD as I flipped the meat and pasta monstrosity out of the pot, but thankfully everything stayed together and carved up nicely. We fed a dozen people and had enough leftover to bring my parents dinner tonight.

What good are holidays if you can’t take the opportunity to go overboard making all your friends and loved ones fat and happy?

Leave a Reply

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>