Fresh Pasta Ravioli with Ricotta Cheese Filling

Menu: Fresh Ravioli with Ricotta Cheese Filling; Random Crunchy Salad with Mustard Vinaigrette and Rosemary

Lessons learned (so many tonight):

1. The first thing you need to do when making homemade pasta is pour yourself a glass of wine.
2. The food processor doesn't make mixing the flour and egg any easier.
3. Flour.  Flour.  Flour.  Flour.  Flour.  Flour.  Flour.  Flour.
4. The pasta maker is not my friend.  Not yet, anyway.
5. Roll the dough through the pasta maker in small batches.
6. Flour, and flour some more.

I love fresh pasta, and I love ravioli.  When I got married, one of the things I put on our registry was a pasta maker.  I also added a ravioli attachment that turns out not to work so well, which I found out after a blood-boiling seven-hour stint in my mother-in-law's kitchen one evening (finally served dinner at 10pm, very grumpy).

Even without the ravioli attachment, my pasta maker is not what I would call user-friendly, but at least you can learn the pitfalls and get used to them.  Not that I have, but I'm trying.

Tonight I got the idea to let my food processor do a lot of the kneading of dough.  It's no electric mixer, but it has a dough attachment, right?  Definitely not worth it, as it turns out.  I still had to do plenty of kneading, and just ended up getting a big dish dirty.  This is the first lesson I learned.

After messing with my pasta maker for several minutes and learning that I needed to practically drench it with flour due to the consistency of the dough, I finally started rolling some sheets successfully.  That's when I realized that I should have opened the wine first thing.  I'd like to claim that my unkempt hair below is a result of my efforts in the kitchen, but I'm pretty sure it was looking that way all day.

As I was making the sheets, I had problems with them getting too long for me to handle, or too sticky to make it through the thinnest, most hazardous, setting.  I learned to use pretty small clumps of dough -- like just big enough to fit in the palm of my hand -- and eventually I abandoned the last setting.  Next time if I have more patience I might try it again.  Here's what I finally ended up with:

Wow, that's a lot of flour.  And you know what?  THEY STILL STUCK TOGETHER.  And to the paper underneath.  Rrrrrrrrrrgh!  OK, so next time I will dump a cup of flour onto the paper and definitely not let any of them touch each other.  You will also notice that they are not gorgeous.  After all the frustration with the pasta rolling, I decided I couldn't care less if they were pretty.

Let me address the obvious question here.  Why make my own ravioli from scratch?  Is it really that much better than frozen ravioli, or especially the fancy fresh ravioli that you can buy in many stores?  I don't know if this would be true for other people, but my answer is yes.  The filling was so fresh and fantastic.  Not even in the same category as cheese ravioli from the freezer section; plus I got to use organic ricotta.  Also I love that you can flavor homemade pasta any way you want.  I just went with plain for tonight because I was so rusty on the prep, but in the past I've done spinach and lemon-pepper and they were yummy.  I would also love to do roasted red pepper and one full of Italian herbs.  The possibilities are endless.  And the more I do it, the easier it will be.  I'll get my method down.  And they really were yummy.

I had to do a blind shopping trip this afternoon while we were out, so I ended up just throwing together an odd salad of lettuce, apples, carrots, radishes, and croutons.  I threw in some rosemary and dressed it with the last of my mustard vinaigrette.

Fresh Pasta Ravioli with Ricotta Cheese Filling

2 1/4 cups all-purposed flour, plus more as needed (I needed LOTS more)
1 teaspoon salt
3 eggs

1 1/2 cups ricotta cheese
1/4 cup grated hard Italian cheese, such as Parmigiano-Reggiano or Pecorino Romano
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
2 cloves garlic, minced
Salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
1 egg

OK, so most recipes for fresh pasta that I've ever seen say to just pile your flour on the countertop or table and then make a "well" in the middle for your eggs, which you then start cutting in with a fork.  I much prefer to just use a bowl!  Put the flour, salt, and eggs in a small mixing bowl.  For me, it worked to keep my canister of flour open and next to me with a scoop at all times during this process; that way I could always dip my ball of dough right in it if needed, or sprinkle it over any of the surfaces I was using.  Once you're all set up there, just start kneading and keep going until the dough isn't sticky anymore.  When it's the right consistency, cover the bowl with a damp towel to prevent the dough from drying out as you work.

Next make the filling, so it's ready to go when you need it.  Just mix the cheeses, seasonings, and egg together in a bowl and keep it next to your work area with a small spoon.

I happen to have a pasta maker, so I'll give directions for that.  For ravioli, you could try using a rolling pin, but that's just not going to get the dough as thin as a pasta maker will, so be warned.

Divide the dough into 8-10 pieces.  Each piece may seem small, but as you feed it through the pasta maker at each setting, it can get very long and hard to manage without tearing it.  Clamp the pasta maker to your counter or table, attach the feed tray, and turn the dial to the thickest setting (on my machine, that's number 1).  Feed your first piece of dough through each setting once or twice, trying to keep the sheets straight and even as they go through.  My dough was fine going through only once on each setting until I got to the thinnest one.  If you're going to use the thinnest setting, you probably need to feed the dough through the previous setting at least twice beforehand.  Mine tore and crimped each time I didn't do that.

Now you need to decide what size you want your raviolis to be.  I ended up making larger ones.  In my opinion these are tastier because there's a larger amount of filling to be had in each one.  But they can look kind of shapeless and sloppy, too.  If you want the large ones, lay out one sheet of pasta horizontally (from your view) on a floured surface and spoon large globs of filling onto either the right or left side of the sheet, spaced out by about 1/2" - 3/4".  Then fold the other side over the filling side and press down around the globs to seal them in.  If you're worried that it won't stick, sprinkle or brush a little bit of water on the dough first.  If you want to make smaller ones, you can put smaller globs of filling all along the horizontal sheet on the half closest to you, then fold the far half over toward you and seal in the filling.  When you're done, cut the squares with a pizza cutter and arrange them on a floured tray.  Repeat until the dough and filling are all used.  You can get 20-25 large raviolis or maybe 35-40 smaller ones.

Boil a large pot of water.  When the water is boiling, add the raviolis but make sure you don't overcrowd the pot; they're done when they float at the top.  It takes very little time, like less than 2 minutes.  It's easy to work in batches if you have a slotted spoon or similar tool to fish the raviolis out when they're done.

Serve immediately with your favorite tomato sauce and some grated cheese.  And save some wine for when you're eating.