Day Three

Today we make ravioli. I have a few successful dinner parties under my belt and rarely does any meal go over better than fresh pasta. It sounds hard and tedious, but here are a few reasons to try it: 1. fresh pasta tastes better 2. it has that homemade/made with love look and feel 3. it makes your guest believe they are in the midst of a true gourmand even though making it is more Play-doh than Michelangelo 3.5. It's a cheap, but luxurious way to feed small group.

We started making homemade pasta for dinner parties about a year ago. I brought home a pasta maker then promptly elected Adam (the b-friend) as the house pasta maker. We (the royal we) use a pasta maker to achieve a thinner noodle. You can certainly roll the pasta out as thin as you can and this is very satisfying; I did it in Italy, once. But remember we are trying to get the pasta thin. The noodles will bulk up while cooking. In any case, as with any recipe, I try on myself before trying/inflicting it on friends.

Ok, so ravioli. We need:

1.5 hours (maybe more our first time out) and approximately $7 (including filling, but not sauce)

3 eggs
2.5 cups of flour

Filling

We're going with a simple stuffing of ricotta. I borrowed from this recipe from Teresa DeSantis: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/the-best-of/homemade-ravioli-with-ricotta-cheese-filling-recipe/index.html. You can fill your ravioli with whatever you like, our main purpose here is to take on the challenge of the pasta and then to see how we make them into little packets.

We're making a basic egg pasta recipe, but the dough can be made with or without eggs (substituting water and olive oil). Once you've got the dough, it can be made into any type of pasta you so desire. (Maltagliati--badly cut-- is a nice one: just take your knife to the dough and cut away.)

Ok, ok, here we go. I think we'll tell this story mostly photographically. When we first start mixing it, it really doesn't look wet enough. We sprinkled it with a little water so it became more like a hard dough. (I wouldn't just add more water from the get-go because it can easily become too wet.) Basically don't get discouraged: at every step of the way it looked like we were doing it wrong. The dough we end up with looks like dry clay. Once we have the dough we leave it uncovered (though you can cover it with a damp towel) for 15 minutes. The moisture content in important and tricky, so keep an eye on it.


To get started we separate the ball into five hunks then pound the dough into a paddle shape. When we run it though the roller, things get tricky. The important thing to remember is to start with the widest setting and go down one notch at time. The dough comes out with holes in it. Again, we're thinking we screwed it up; but again, this is normal--or if not normal does still lead us to good pasta in the end.

We take two holey sheets and run them through together. When we want a longer sheet we shove one sheet in before the first is finished to get them to stick together. In the end we want nice long sheets without holes. This is all we ask!

Once we have a hole-less sheet we put it back through the pasta maker one setting thinner. When they are too long to manage, we cut them in half. We go all the way down to setting one, the thinnest. We end up with six long rectangles.

We baste the dough with egg wash (or water), place dollops of ricotta filling every inch and a half (but it can be bigger or larger), then fold over the dough, and crimp between the dollops to squish out the air creating a 1/4" crimp between raviolis, and finally crimp the front (Adam uses scrap molding, but I'm sure there are more hygienic methods available). To cut them we use a pie edger, to beautify our ravioli.


Note: about six ravioli into the process we realized that we had skipped the step of draining the ricotta (it looked pretty dry to us, but what do we know). We were getting soggy ravioli. I highly recommend squeezing the ricotta through cheesecloth.


Our dinner party isn't until tonight so we store the ravioli on a parchment lined baking sheet in the fridge.