We had the courage, the inspiration, and the appetite .... so all we needed was a few crucial supplies. Popped over to Williams & Sonoma in Beverly Hills to get an old school pasta hand crank. Made by Imperia, it's a masterpiece in red and steel. Or, one might even say, ginger and grey. Plus we got a ravioli tray with mini-rolling pin for making our little pillows of yum. We were set.
Making ravioli at home is not for the faint of heart, or those who fear to get their hands (and kitchens) dirty. But, with some music playing and a fire crackling in the background -- and of course a good bottle of wine opened and at the ready -- it is indeed a labor of love.
Begin with the dough. Ours was a half-and-half mix of regular flour and semolina flour. Whisk that together, then plop it in our food processor. Some folks have fancy mixers but our heroic, do-it-all Breville food processor (very wise kitchen investment, for the record) has a dough setting. In went some eggs and some olive oil, and out came something that looked like proper dough.
But like with most good things, you have to work to get what you want. For ten solid minutes, we kneaded the dough. Adding flour and a spritz of olive oil (thanks Misto!) when needed to keep it from sticking, Brien and I took turns kneading the dough with our knuckles. It was good tactile fun, but hard work! After ten minutes, my knuckles felt like Rocky after a losing bout. Then our dough went into the fridge to, as Brien so eloquently put it, "relax the glutens" for a half-hour. My glutens were in need to relaxing too, but no rest for the chefs.
While our dough was maxin' and relaxin' in the fridge, we made our fillings. We each made one, of course, in the spirit of household competition. Brien whipped up a lovely spinach pesto made with fresh spinach leaves, sheep's milk ricotta, nutmeg, and a grating of hard aged goat cheese. I made a blue cheese and walnut filling with balsamic. Both smelled divine.
Next came the fun part — making the pasta sheets! It's a lot of trial and error, and at the beginning it felt like more error. But we persevered, and were handsomely rewarded. Making pasta is definitely a two person endeavor. Brien cranked the dough through the pasta press, and I pulled it out on the other side. Fold and repeat, until dough is at desired width and consistency. The challenge, we learned, was to make the dough thin enough that it wasn't gloopy in your mouth, but thick enough to hold the fillings in together. Our first batch used too thin of dough, and the resulting ravioli came out more like mutated dumplings. (No matter. They tasted just as good.)
So, lay one sheet of pasta on the ravioli tray, pat it down lightly into the divots, spoon in filling, lay another sheet of pasta over the filling, use mini rolling pin to flatten and seal, and gently wiggle the raviolis out of their tray, sealing the edges with your fingers so none of the good stuff leaks out. To make the dough stick, we used an "egg wash" (I kept calling it an egg dip, much to Brien's consternation). Brush on just a bit of egg yolk to help the dough bind to itself. How sad if your raviolis fall apart in the pot!
We were ready for the moment of truth. We froze our extras and then selected the choicest morsels for dinner. A big pot of boiling water, and in they went. We both held our breath. But voila! They held together. We were rapturous with self-satisfaction. They boiled on high for about 4 minutes, then out of the water they went. Because our fillings were rich and flavorful, we kept the sauce simple: a bit of high quality olive oil, a bit of the water from the pot to help things stick, fresh grated Parmesan, and a shaved black Burgundy truffle to top it all off. Yes, it smelled every bit as divine as you'd expect.
And tasted even better. We powered down our ravioli, fingers still white with flour (as was my face and hair, I later came to discover). Yes, the meal took about 4 hours to make, but it was so worth it. We accompanied our feast with a bottle of L'Avion, a great bottle of white from the Santa Ynez Valley just north of us on the Central Coast of CA. It was 90% Roussanne, 10% Viognier, and 100% delicious: silky in the mouth, with a nose of butter and minerals both, and a palate filled with stone fruit, graphite, and fig. We had a 2007 vintage and it was impeccable — a really sophisticated and surprising white.
Afterwards there was the inevitable clean-up and even this morning I am finding flour in the strangest places. It's not a meal for every weekend and certainly not when you're in a hurry — but there is something deliciously satisfying about homemade ravioli, made together with love. A perfect autumn meal.
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