Adventures in Pasta

Last weekend brought with it a new adventure in cooking - one that Mark and I took on together for Date Night on Saturday. Mark suggested that we finally break open a Christmas gift from eons ago (seriously, I think it was a gift from me to him before we got married!) and make individualized ravioli, from scratch!

The beauty of this idea is that Mark and I generally have very different food cravings. For example, pizza night usually involves two separate pies - a meat lovers with extra cheese for Mark, and a veggie option for me (not that I don't like meat, I just LOVE spinach and onions and peppers and mushrooms). So we picked our fillings and set out to make the pasta.

Amazingly, the dough is quite easy to mix, using only a few ingredients. Each serving contains 2 oz. semolina, 1 1/2 -2 oz. bread flour, 1 egg, 1 t vegetable oil and a pinch of salt (water is optional if the dough gets too dry).



After kneeding and letting the dough sit for 15 minutes, we then prepared it for the pasta maker, ensuring it was well floured on both sides.


The trick to making good dough is to pass it through the flat rollers multiple times to continue to kneed the dough. The knob at the top has numbered settings ranging from 7 to 1 (thick to thin).

After each pass through, more flour is dusted on the dough. The knob setting is then stepped down, to make the dough increasingly thinner. We ended on setting 5, deciding that ravioli that is too thin would not hold the filling very well.

Meanwhile, on the stove our fillings were cooking. Mark chose a spicy Italian sausage mixture, which he used both in his ravioli and in his sauce. I opted for spinach, garlic and mushrooms with fresh mozzarella for my filling.


Once the dough was rolled to our desired thinness, we cut it to fit width of the ravioli plate, added our fillings to half the dough strip, and folded the remaining over, pressing the edges well. Was this the correct approach? Not quite sure, but since our manual no longer exists and the on-line version was lacking specific instructions, we improvised.


Admittedly, this rolling and cutting of the ravioli squares was nowhere near perfect in our multiple attempts. Adding the filling was tricky - it can't be too warm (mistake #1) or too thickly spread (mistakes #2-4) as these both cause the ravioli to ooze and not remain intact as it is rolled through the cutting plates.

Alas, here is what we ended up with. Not very evenly stuffed, but perhaps next time, with more practice. :)

After 4 leisurely hours of playing with dough, Mark perfecting our sauces (Fresh basil is key here, friends. And lots of it.) and "experimenting" with the pasta maker our ravioli finally made it to water that had been boiling on the stove for a good hour in preparation. The bottle of wine we consumed along the way certainly added to the fun of the evening!


The final result? One of the most fulfilling and enjoyable pasta dishes we've ever had, and an experience that we'll look back on fondly for years to come.


Buon appetito!