It's a ravioli maker that Drew's mom sent me! It comes with this frame...
And a tray that presses the holes into the dough.
I have been waiting for an opportunity to make a giant batch of ravioli with this, and when I was snowbound last week, I decided to take advantage of the extra time at home by making these fun ravs.
I had made some shrimp ravioli back in the fall completely from scratch and without any sort of machine other than a pizza cutter and a rolling pin. This proved to be delicious, but my ravioli turned out ginormous. You eat three and you move up a dress size. They were beastly. Delicious but beastly.
The ravioli maker makes this process a lot easier. I just decided to make the inside simple (just some seasoned ricotta) and focused on perfecting my technique. And um, making them all uniform. Haha. Plus, making a bunch of ravs and storing them in the freezer means easy meals anytime I want them!
Ingredients (34 ravioli):
-2 cups flour
-2 whole eggs, plus 2 egg yolks
-a dash of salt
-1 tsp olive oil
Filling
-3/4 cup ricotta
-1 tbsp italian seasoning
-1 tsp garlic powder
-1 tsp salt
1. Make the dough by dropping your eggs into a "well" in the center of your flour mound. People advise you do this on a surface, but i just make it in a big mixing bowl. Less mess.
2. So after kneading the dough, I came up with this ugly specimen.
Pasta dough is way uglier than bread dough. But whatcha gonna do?
3. I formed a brick with a fourth of the dough so that when i roll it out, it will maintain a rectagularish shape.
4. Then i carefully rolled out the dough. This is really the hardest part. I look forward to when we register for our wedding and I finally get my Kitchen Aid with a pasta rolling extension :) But for now, the rolling pin will do. Here I made a piece just bigger than the 12X4 frame of the ravioli maker.
5. And then i draped it across the frame.
6. Then I pressed the tray into the frame.
Here it goes!
Aww look at the cute little cuppies!
7. Next, I mixed up a batch of the filling. I kept it real simple since this was really a test batch.
Then i filled each little cuppy with the ricotta mixture. Yum!
8. Then I rolled out another layer of dough and laid it on top.
Here we go!
And then you take a rolling pin to push the top dough into the frame.
Once you get the zigzag ridges peeking through, it's been sealed. Nice! No egg white brushing necessary!
I tore off the edges.
Then tapped them out of the frame and onto the counter. Tada!
I did this a few more times and got about 34 ravioli (2 batches of 12, then 1 batch where i could only roll out the dough wide enough to cover 10 holes). Eek, math!
When they were done, I laid them out on the counter to dry. Then I froze them.
These are great cuz at anytime i can just boil them up and pour some sauce over them.
To cook them, I salted a pot of water and brought it to a boil. I put the ravs in there to cook for about 7-9 minutes. When you fish them out, they look like this!
How cute are they? I poured my favorite spinach and parmesan sauce over it.
Delicious! And look how yummy they look on the inside!
What happiness! I have a nice collection of these in my freezer now to get me through the week. Thanks for such a fun and useful gift, Jen! :)
Love it! Where does a person go about getting a tool like that though? I've been dying to make ravioli, and this would probably get me to actually do it.
ReplyDeleteHey Shana! I would search the Williams Sonoma catalog for something like this. They have all kinds of i-never-would-have-thought-of-that inventions for cooking :)
ReplyDeleteThanks! I browsed around a bit online too, and found that there's about a million different kinds of these things! I will definitely be getting one, along with the 30 lbs that will come with all the ravioli I'm gonna make! :)
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