Ravioli virgin no more
On Saturday, I decided that I was going to make ravioli for the first time.
I’ve made a bunch of pasta before, but I wanted to apply some of the techniques I’d learned from both Thomas Keller and Gordon Ramsay. Plus, practice makes perfect — I find working with dough is one of those things that just requires repetition.
The recipe I used for the dough is the same I’ve used before — it happens to also be the recipe Thomas Keller uses:
- 250g of egg yolk (approximately 15 egg yolks)
- 1 whole egg (in my case, a duck egg just because)
- Pinch of salt
- 30g of olive oil
- 30 grams of half and half
I placed all the ingredients in a bowl, less the flour. After cleaning my work surface, I poured the flour onto the counter.
You make a well in the mound of flour and pour the liquid contents in. As I was doing this, I had the strong memory of making a baking soda volcano as a kid for science fair.
With a fork, slowly start to mix the sides of the well in with the egg mixture. While doing this, it’s important not to breach the wall of the well — not because it will somehow change the recipe, but because it makes a huge mess while runny. Because the ratio of liquid to flour is about 3:5 (adding in the milk and oil), it will be a very dry mixture.
As you mix more and more of the sides into the egg, the mixture will get stiffer. At some point, the mixture is no longer runny — this is when you get your hands dirty and start kneading the dough. In my case, the dough was so dry that I added about 30 grams of water to incorporate the final bits of dry material. Work the dough for about 10 minutes until you have a smooth ball of dough.
Once the dough is mixed and smooth (the dough in the above photo isn’t quite shiny enough — I worked it for another 2 minutes or so), wrap it in cling wrap tightly and refrigerate for 2 hours. This is an extremely important step — kneading the dough creates gluten. Gluten (wheat protein) strands grab at each other in the dough, making it very dense and resistant to shaping (the strands want to stay intertwined with each other). The refrigeration helps relax the strands, making the pasta easier to shape and work. Rolling the above into sheets just wouldn’t work.
While the dough was resting, I wanted to start on my filling. In this case, I wanted to do mushroom filling. I chose shitake and hen of the woods mushrooms. Shitake’s have a great earthy flavor to them, while hen of the woods have that and a fantastic peppery note.
One of the things I learned from Gordon Ramsay is the importance of cooking the filling of the ravioli first — the boiling of the completed pasta should be only to cook the pasta itself, not the filling. As a result, I knew I needed to have the mushrooms cut very thinly. I thought, briefly, about doing this by hand. Since I wanted to eat sometime this week, I decided to use the mandolin attachment in my food processor.
Hen of the woods are naturally flaky, so there’s no need to process them other than breaking the clumps apart.
Mushrooms are about 30% water — you want to get as much of that out, otherwise the liquid in the ravioli creates steam and will burst the ravioli while cooking. I started the process by finely chopping garlic.
Because I didn’t want the garlic burn, I kept the flame as low as possible — I added salt and pepper and let the garlic soften. After about 10 minutes, I added the mushroom mixture.
The mushroom juice leaves mostly as steam — in order to make sure the garlic is mixed into the mushrooms, I turned over the cooking mixture as it cooks.
Getting the water out of the mushrooms means that they start to caramelize. This highlights both the earthiness of the mushrooms as well as accentuates the pepperiness of the hen of the woods.
While the mushrooms were cooking, I wanted to get started on the rest of the filling: Italian parsley and ricotta. I chose ricotta over mascarpone because I wanted to skew savory vs the sweet back-note of mascarpone.
Now that I have the right level of caramelization on the mushrooms, I added the cooked mushroom into the bowl with the ricotta and Italian parsley. One of the benefits the steel mixing bowl is that it will help bleed off the heat of the cooked mushrooms, allowing me to work with the mixture more quickly.
The next thing I needed to do start making the pasta sheets. To do this, I took the pasta ball out of the fridge and started peeling off pieces to put through the pasta roller.
One of the things that Gordon Ramsay emphasizes is the importance of liberally dusting both your hands and the pasta roller with flour. In the past, I’ve found that the pasta always sticks to the roller — to the point that I’d stopped using it in favor of a rolling pin. Turns out, dusting with flour is the key.
My pasta attachment goes from 1 (thickest) to 8 (thinnest). I started by carving off a slightly-larger-than golf ball sized ball of dough. After shaping it with a rolling pin, I put it through the pasta roller. I took the dough from 1 to 5, putting the dough through the roller twice at each level. One of the other things I realized: as the dough gets thinner, I needed to consciously start using either the palm of my hand or the back of my hand to manipulate the dough. My natural inclination was to get the dough onto my fingertips — as the dough gets thinner and thinner, this starts to tear holes in the sheet.
I have a stainless steel container that’s about 1.75"–2" in diameter. I decided to use it as my cutter for the ravioli disks. As it turns out, this container is also ideal for making eggy-in-a-basket, but that’s a story for another time.
After the what seemed like 17 hours of cutting disks, it was time to start actually making the ravioli.
As it turns out, as long as cutting the disks takes, it takes even more time to actually make the ravioli. Depending on how moist the pasta dough is, you can assemble the ravioli by just pressing together the pasta sheets. As I got towards the earliest disks I cut, the pasta sheets had dried out to the extent that I needed to use an egg wash to get the disks to adhere to each other. At the end of the day, I made about 40 ravioli over the course of almost an hour. Plan accordingly — this will take you time when you make them.
With all that done, it was time to start the sauce. I knew that the creaminess of the ricotta in the filling meant that I needed to have an acid / sharp sauce to complement it. After a lot of thought, I settled on a brown butter sage sauce — this is something similar to a saltimbocca sauce. I decided to add pancetta, too, again hitting on that saltimbocca note.
I started by chopping the shallot finely (mostly), and then added pancetta and butter to let things start to sweat. I continue to be blown away by what shallots do to a sauce chemically — classic French cooking uses a roux (fat and flour cooked) as the basis of their 5 mother sauces. The roux emulsifies the fat and allows you to create a thick, silky sauce. Magically, the shallots seem to do the same thing.
In order to continue that mushroom theme, I added some small white mushrooms whos actual name I’ve managed to forget. They’re relatively tasteless — I really wanted to use them to visually reinforce the mushroom thing. For good measure, I added still more butter — after all, mushrooms are sponges!
Once this had cooked down a bit more and the mushrooms began to caramelize, I added ~14+ fresh sage leaves. I knew I wanted to add the leaves towards the end of the cooking process, since I didn’t want to burn off their flavor. The aroma of the sage, plus butter and pancetta is AMAZING. The cooked sage adds a herb-y citrus note to the sauce that’s just incredible. I’ll complement this by putting fresh lemon zest on the ravioli before I ladle the sauce on.
With the sage in and cooking, I deglazed the pan with roughly half a bottle of vino verde, letting it simmer. Again, due to the magic of cooked shallots, I knew that the sauce would coalesce into a smooth, unbroken sauce. While this was simmering down, it was time to get the ravioli into the water.
Because the filling of the ravioli was already cooked, I knew the ravioli needed to cook for only about 90 seconds. The strainer was cold, so I upped that time a little while the pot recovered to temp. After it was done, I picked out the ravioli and placed them into shallow pasta bowls.
Thinking about what I’ve learned from Thomas Keller and Gordon Ramsay, I wanted to both make it visually exciting as well as highlight the flavors of the mushrooms by adding an additional citrus note. I sprinkled fresh lemon zest on top and the added fresh oregano leaves. Incidentally, if you’ve never tasted fresh oregano (I hadn’t until starting this cooking journey), it’s amazing. It’s a relative of mint, and has a somewhat similar sensation on the tongue, but where mint skews sweet, oregano just nods savory.
I ladled the sauce from the pan over the freshly dressed pasta. Our dinner guest was kind enough to make a lightly dressed salad that paired perfectly with the pasta. I have to say of anything I’ve cooked, this seemed the most unadulteratedly awesome. Now I just need to carve out more time to make ravioli!
