Two Recipes for Spinach Ravioli

Ravioli is not for the faint of heart. I'm pretty sure my kitchen looked like some sort of exotic disaster zone after my mom and I finished making dinner. There were so many pots, pans, bowls, cutting boards, cookie ravioli sheets, wooden spoons, appliances, scraps of wax paper, and balls of pasta dough adorning my kitchen that you couldn't see the island counter, the stove, or the sink. And then there were the ravioli themselves

What is sauce for, am I right?

That said, for those with a heart as robust as their stomachs, these were totally worth it. They are delicious, restaurant-quality, and pretty technically easy. Not easy as in yes there is a lot of hand-manipulation, but easy as in they worked remarkably well. This is the first time I've given it a go, and despite a few purportedly (but not actually) calamitous glitches they were delicious!

What's also nice about ravioli is that you can make them from pretty much whatever you have sitting around, and since there is so little filling per ravioli it is really easy to scrounge leftovers. I'm looking forward to making some with stuffed-pepper filling left over from our Super Bowl party!

After slavering over diverse potential ravioli recipes, I wanted to experiment at least a little, so I made two different fillings, both with spinach as a base (we had spinach for a side the night before). (Plus I had to throw away a third butternut squash filling because of sour shallots so subtract the defunct and divide by two and the clutter situation would really have been reasonable!). In one of my recipes, I mixed the spinach with ricotta and covered the ravioli with pine-nut brown butter sauce. My other dish was spinach, parmesan, and prosciutto-filled pasta with a white wine, cream, and cheese sauce.

The fillings were really easy to make and don't really require a recipe (don't panic: I'm not leaving you hanging). I think making two sauces also added to the general chaos of the process. Next time I make ravioli I will try a single filling with a single sauce and see if I can't turn it into a manageable dinner.

What follows is: 1) generic directions for how to assemble ravioli (just in case you already have the perfect flavor combination eating a hole in your stomach), 2) my recipe for spinach-ricotta ravioli with pine-nut brown butter sauce and 3) spinach-parmesan prosciutto ravioli with a white wine, cream, and cheese sauce.

My First Time Making Fresh Pasta

So I finally had a chance to break out my new Christmas present...

It's a pasta-roller attachment for my mixer. It rolls the pasta dough out for you mechanically so you have two hands free for the really long diaphanous sheet that is the final product. It's a super nice machine and I was excited about it, because I have been talking about rolling out pasta with a dowel for a really long time and, predictably, have never yet gotten around to it.

There are actually three attachments: one to roll our your sheet to the desired thickness, and another two for splitting it into spaghetti or linguine noodles. I decided to make ravioli, but now that I've gotten the hang of it I'll probably make a go for homemade spaghetti!

I ended up making two batches of dough. I did the first one manually. It just doesn't feel like you can claim you've actually made pasta until you've kneaded some by hand!

Unfortunately for my romantic pasta-related ambitions, I have never made it before, so I pretty much copied the ratio and the technique from this YouTube video posted by a very nice man who clearly knows much more about pasta than I do. You know what, I'm just going to embed it in my blog so you can learn from the expert.

I was pretty giddy when my finished product looked like pasta dough :D

It was at this point that I was informed that we would be having three extra high-school-aged boys for dinner and that we would probably need more pasta. I thought I would experiment with the second batch and try making the pasta dough completely mechanically, which, if it worked, would be much more convenient in the future. 

I also used a different recipe that lent itself more easily to combining in a mixer, this one containing olive oil instead of just flower and eggs. 

Guess which one worked better. :(  So much for being an honorary Italian ;) 

What happened is when I tried to thread the hand-kneaded dough through the roller-attachment, it was developing these strange pockmark-like indentations, in contrast to the mixer-formed dough, which smoothed out very nicely into a strong, stretchy, translucent sheet that could be rolled very thin. It could be because I refrigerated the hand-kneaded dough, which apparently you're not supposed to do, or it could be that the addition of the olive oil in the second recipe helped everything come together better, or it could be that I am an incompetent kneader, which is not entirely out of the question!

At any rate, both of the doughs I made were functional (and delicious!), so I am posting both recipes/techniques. If anyone has any tips or input about preferred pasta-making methods, please comment!