Ricotta Ravioli with Fresh Tomatoes – Pg. 85

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This recipe is an absolute delight, and I have to say I was so glad to see this was the first pasta recipe as we have been experimenting with making fresh pasta and another excuse to make dough is always welcome. 

Yeah.  So I completely jacked my first batch of dough, here after I was all excited to make dough again.  Came out hard as a freakin rock.  And really, if you’re trying to kneed dough and it’s just not moving under your fingers pitch it and start over.   Which is what I did, and wasted the fresh eggs we’d gotten from downtown.  I think I almost knocked over the trashcan that crap was so hard.  Sigh….

Second batch of dough AWESOME!  Probably the best dough I’ve ever made.  Apparently I’m better at making dough after a glass of wine.  I used half semolina and half whole wheat pastry flour, not really what it called for, but yay healthier!  The pastry flour is important as opposed to regular whole wheat flour as it is ground finer and the dough will be smoother, but you still have the benefit of whole wheat.  I also used 5 eggs instead of 4, I had to kneed in a touch more flour but it was definitely the way to go, the texture was much better.   I used my Kitchen Aid dough hook, a much less messy start, I always spill the eggs all over the counter when I try to do it completely by hand.  Jas can do it and it’s impressive to watch.  Me, not so much.  God love technology. 

The filling was easy, I was going to walk to the Italian market and get fresh ricotta, but we had some store-bought stuff in the fridge and since it was there I wanted to use it.  In retrospect I should have just gone to the market, since the ricotta was the star flavor it would made a difference, though it was still spectacular.  I added some thyme to the ricotta too, and completely forgot the cinnamon.  Oops… 

I used the dough rolling attachment for the Kitchen Aid to roll the dough as well, the rolling pin sounded fun but I wanted the dough to be uniform in thickness.  Plus that thing is just totally fun to use and I am highly uncoordinated.  I rolled one piece at a time and then made the ravioli from that piece before rolling out the next piece, easier to do it one at a time.  I also got one of those ravioli cutters at the kitchen store downtown and it worked like a champ!!  Soooo much better than ravioli attachments or trying to cut it yourself, plus it pleated the edges and looked cool. 

So with the whole wheat I had to boil the pasta for 8 minutes instead of 5, but the dough turned out great.  I stuffed them so big that we ended up freezing half the batch, we had about 5 ravioli each and we were stuffed!  Of course Jas made great garlic bread on the grill to go along with it, so without that we may have had a few more…  but damn I wouldn’t have skipped it.  

Oh the sauce!  Romas really are the best, and the ones from the downtown market are just delightfully fresh.  I peeled, seeded, and chopped them in the morning so I wouldn’t have to worry about it later, much easier to make the sauce that way.  And FYI, anytime a recipe says “oh hey, just peel, seed, and chop tomatoes…”  yeah…  that’s like an hour’s worth of work.  And they just put it so casually in the recipes…  But!  On the upside the tomatoes were wonderfully fresh from the market.  The whole dish turned out great with relatively little work, I would do this again over and over!!!! 

Note for those interested:  If you find you have too many and would like to freeze them, before you cook them lay them out on parchment paper and put that on a cookie sheet.  Put the cookie sheet in the freezer with the raw ravioli on it for about 4 hours until frozen, then you can move them to a bag and keep them in the freezer.  This method will prevent them from sticking to each other when frozen and you can pull them out individually if needed.  

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