Ravioli (a form a stuffed pasta) may be the goofier-looking cousins of tortellini, but make no mistake, ravioli are not only easier to make, but darn, darn tasty. Let me lift the prejudice that you may have concerning these nondescript culinary wonders. Like many citizens of the pasta world, the only obvious difference between the two is their shape; ravioli are square with a bump in the middle and tortellini are folded in on themselves. The shape of ravioli give them a distinct advantage over their belly-button shaped brethren: they hold more filling! Which means more taste! More subtle contrast between velvety dough and melt in your mouth filling! More . . . good stuff! So let’s figure out what make ravioli tick! And eat them, obviously.
Pasta machines make your life easier
The first step to good ravioli is good pasta dough! I covered many of the basics in my previous post about pasta dough, but what we’ll focus on today is the manual pasta machine. While these machines are almost certainly the quickest shortcut to perfect pasta dough, they can be somewhat tricky to operate. Let’s talk about it.
All manual pasta machines are based around a similar design, which is code for, from a practical standpoint, they’re all more or less the same. A crank operates two small, metal rollers and a dial moves them closer together as desired. Amazon’s most popular model looks like this. That’s not to say that the machines don’t have features worth looking at. Alton Brown recommends getting one that’s as wide as possible since long strands of pasta dough can be very difficult to work with. I myself don’t mind quite as much, provided that the cutters (the attachments that slice and dice your dough into different shapes) are sharp and do their job well.
The real key to using a pasta machine is my biggest weakness — you need to follow the directions exactly. For over a year, I thought the cutters of my pasta machine were broken when in fact I needed to wait for ten minutes between getting the dough rolled out to its thinnest setting and cutting it, something I would have known if I’d read the directions. So, moral of the story: READ THE DIRECTIONS OF YOUR PASTA MACHINE!
Once you’ve set your machine up according to the instructions (which are IMPORTANT), the operation is fairly simple; roll little balls of dough through the machine by turning the crank and end up with perfect sheets of pasta, right? Well, in theory yes, but with a few caveats. Especially in the beginning, you’ll need to laminate your dough a time or two. LAMINATE? Yeah, calm down, it just means that you fold it in thirds, push it together a bit, and feed it through the machine at a slight angle. Why? Weeeeeeeelllllllllll . . .
Think of pie dough. Bear with me! When you make pie dough, you do your best to not put too much pressure on it. Who remembers why? That’s right! It’s because pressure forms gluten! But where that’s a bad thing for pie dough, it’s great (within reason) for pasta! See, when you’re working with pasta, your goal is to get the dough to roll down as thin as it possibly can, and this process often tears the dough. When you laminate the dough, you give the dough a chance to build little gluten bridges inside itself that will keep the dough together, even as it gets paper-thin. Now, there’s also an argument that laminating dough makes for a better texture in the final product, and that may or may not be true depending on who you talk to. But for our purposes, we laminate mainly to keep the dough from tearing and to speed up the pasta making process.
Ravioli Construction
Now, there are lots of other things to talk about with ravioli — how to decide between a fluted edge and a straight one, how to use the starch on the dough to make the glue that will hold the ravioli together, and so on and so forth, but all that stuff is going to have to wait for another post! Today instead, we’ll be talking about another truly basic but supremely important aspect of ravioli making — spacing.
Spacing of what, you ask? Why, the spacing between each clump of your filling. Sound basic? Don’t let that fool you — this simple concept has caused quadrillions (tooooootally no exaggeration there) of ravioli hopefuls to have their (read this next part in your most menacing voice) dreams dashed against the pavement, shattered like a snow globe by the cold, hard reality of life.
Why is this basic concept so important? Simple: When you don’t leave enough room between dollops of filling, you can’t reliably seal and cut each of the ravioli. If you do not seal and cut them correctly, the will explode as you cook them and spill your ravioli dreams (also known as the ravioli filling) into the boiling water. Make sense?
So how much space should you leave between each dollop of filling? America’s Test Kitchen recommends 1.25 inches between each dollop and Mark Bittman (of NYT and cookbook fame) recommends 1.5 inches. I recommend sticking with 1.5 if you’re a beginner and slowly moving down to 1.25 with time (I think things just look a little prettier at 1.25 inches). Now, there’s one last thing that you need to know about spacing and it is . . .
USE A RULER! Seriously, go out to your local craft store, buy an 18″ metal ruler and be done with it! You’ll be glad that you did.
Now go out and make this! Eat it! And enjoy the process!
- 1 recipe pasta dough
- 16 oz. ricotta cheese, drained on a paper towel
- 12 oz spinach, stemmed and steamed
- 8 oz. parmesan cheese
- 1 egg
- Nutmeg, freshly grated
- Roll out pasta dough to the thinnest setting, carefully following your pasta machine's instructions and laminating (see pasta machine section of post) when necessary. Make sure the final sheets are at least 4 inches wide and a manageable length).
- Drain ricotta on some paper towels or in a fine mesh strainer for a few minutes.
- Grate parmesan cheese while ricotta is draining.
- Rig a steamer or colander over a large pot filled with at least 2 inches of water. Bring the water to a boil and then let simmer. Place spinach in steamer/colander and let steam until tender. Squeeze as much water as you can out of the spinach.
- Combine spinach, ricotta, parmesan and egg in a bowl and mix until spinach is well mixed and broken apart. Grate in nutmeg (probably no more than a teaspoon total)
- Using a teaspoon, measure out filling on each sheet of pasta. Leave 1.5 inches between each dollop of filling.
- Using your finger and a small bowl of water, wet dough LIGHTLY all the way to the filling, fold dough in half and carefully push down on the dough to seal the dough around each dollop of filling. Repeat for each sheet of pasta.
- Boil in a pot of salted water for a minute or two.
- Serve as is or with a sauce and enjoy!
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