FoodB

Christmas was very good to our kitchen. We invited some new cooking items into our midst including a mixer and a pasta machine. With those two items I decided we should try making some ravioli's from scratch. One of our favorite Italian restaurants, Rombi's, has choices of different homemade ravioli's and they are by far some of the best pasta that I have ever had. So instead of going out and paying $30 to eat out, we thought we would try our hand at making some ravioli's.

Here is the recipe that we used to make the dough. It was pretty easy to make in the mixer and I am starting to wonder how we ever lived without one.

Ravioli Dough

3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
4 eggs
2 tablespoons olive oil

1. In an electric mixer fitted with a dough hook, combine flour and salt. Add eggs 1 at a time and continue to mix. Drizzle in oil and continue to incorporate all the flour until it forms a ball. Sprinkle some flour on work surface, knead the dough until elastic and smooth. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and let it rest for about 30 minutes to allow the gluten to relax.
2. Cut the ball of dough in half, cover and reserve the dough you are not immediately using to prevent it from drying out. Dust the counter and dough with flour. Form the dough into a rectangle and roll it through the pasta machine, 2 or 3 times, at its widest setting. Guide the sheet of dough with the palm of your hand as it emerges from the rollers. *Reduce the setting and crank the dough through again, 2 or 3 times. Continue until the machine is at its narrowest setting. The dough should be paper-thin, about 1/8-inch thick.

For the filling we used a spinach, ricotta, parmesan and egg mixture that was pretty tasty. There really is no limit to what you can put inside of a ravioli so we thought we would try the most basic of ingredients. We were also given a ravioli form which creates pockets inside of the stretched dough to place the filling and helps seal the edges.

Once the ravioli's are formed, you need to air dry them for 30 minutes. This is where we screwed up without meaning to. We put the ravioli's on a paper plate and didn't turn them over every few minutes. They ended up sticking to the plates and when we went to cook them there were a few that we had to sacrifice. Cooking them only took 4 minutes in boiling water and all of this was topped with some canned marinara sauce that Jenn had made for Christmas.

This was a lot of work but the results were really good for our first try. Next time I plan on using smaller pieces of dough in the pasta machine because they started to reach lengths of over 4 feet once pressed. Also next time we will use wax paper to dry the finished ravioli's on instead of paper plates.

On another note, the marinara sauce that we canned tasted really good once it had time to set for awhile. Not to say that I don't like the flavor of it when Jenn cooks it fresh, but the flavor just seemed to come together so well after being in the jar. I am starting to think we need to make a bunch of tomato sauces for our own pantry pretty soon.