In the past few years, I’ve accomplished so many things that I’ve had on my bucket list. Run a marathon? Check. Do a triathlon? Check. Travel solo? Check. I decided to brainstorm some more items to my list this past weekend – including making pasta from scratch, which I’ve always seen as an incredible cooking task. Since I had Sunday free, I decided to take it upon myself to tackle it that day by making homemade ravioli from scratch.
Each dough recipe I found had slightly different proportions of flour to egg/water, but I ended up using about 2 cups of flour, 2 eggs, and a drizzle of olive oil. I initially only added 1 egg, but it was definitely too dry so I added another.
Now, I don’t own a pasta roller, but I figured I could do everything with a rolling pin. What I forgot, until I got to the point to roll everything out, was that my rolling pin was in my apartment fire last year and I never replaced it. I also had (incorrectly) assumed that pasta dough would be similar to pie crust – relatively easy to roll out. I was very wrong. Pasta dough is much tougher than a pie crust. My improvised “roller” of a 2 liter seltzer bottle wasn’t doing the trick. So I sat there for an hour and a half breaking the dough into small pieces and literally smushing them by hand until they were relatively thin.
When I finally got all the pieces thin enough, the rest was fun and easy. I mixed some ricotta, parmesan, and parsley to stuff the ravioli pieces, put the filling in the pasta, and shaped the raviolis. Boiled everything in a large pot for about 10 minutes, and topped it with some marinara sauce and a tiny bit more parmesan cheese. Delicious!
Each dough recipe I found had slightly different proportions of flour to egg/water, but I ended up using about 2 cups of flour, 2 eggs, and a drizzle of olive oil. I initially only added 1 egg, but it was definitely too dry so I added another.
Now, I don’t own a pasta roller, but I figured I could do everything with a rolling pin. What I forgot, until I got to the point to roll everything out, was that my rolling pin was in my apartment fire last year and I never replaced it. I also had (incorrectly) assumed that pasta dough would be similar to pie crust – relatively easy to roll out. I was very wrong. Pasta dough is much tougher than a pie crust. My improvised “roller” of a 2 liter seltzer bottle wasn’t doing the trick. So I sat there for an hour and a half breaking the dough into small pieces and literally smushing them by hand until they were relatively thin.
When I finally got all the pieces thin enough, the rest was fun and easy. I mixed some ricotta, parmesan, and parsley to stuff the ravioli pieces, put the filling in the pasta, and shaped the raviolis. Boiled everything in a large pot for about 10 minutes, and topped it with some marinara sauce and a tiny bit more parmesan cheese. Delicious!
The first completed ravioli. Go me!
An hour and a half after starting, I finally get all the ravioli done.
Cooking!
And the final product...yum! They were very delicious, but I'll probably invest in a pasta roller (or at least a rolling pin!) before I try to make it again, haha.
RSS Feed
