Of course, I started with dough. I was happier this time with how it came together - much less waste.
Next, I cut the dough into 6 parts and flattened each section into a 4-inch wide sheet at level 3 thickness. I don't have the ravioli attachment for my machine, so the remaining steps were completed by hand. I combined the ingredients for the cheese filling - parmesan, ricotta, mozzarella, egg yolk, and parsley - and portioned out heaping teaspoons of the stuff onto each pasta sheet. Next, it was fold, press, and cut.
Don't be fooled. Not all of them were pretty.
Pretty and ugly alike, I let the little pouches wait around on a cookie sheet until the water was boiling. Unfortunately, I didn't heed the cookbook's warning about sprinkling the sheet liberally with flour, so some of them tore when I transferred them to the pot. Consequently, those ravioli were waterlogged. But! Most of them turned out.
I topped the ravioli with a simple, no-cook tomato sauce (America's Test Kitchen recipe #2). Ripe tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, grated Parmesan, fresh basil, and a little salt. My favorite part of putting this sauce together was the aroma of the basil! My food processor never smelled so good.
The finished product:
Making ravioli was tiring and labor-intensive (4 hours start to finish) but overall pretty worth it. I plan to do a few things differently next time, though. I'd like to try the ravioli with a cream sauce or a pesto instead. I liked the no-cook sauce, but I think that sauce works better with a smaller noodle like penne. On the subject of sauce, I'd like to try tossing the ravioli with sauce beforehand to evenly coat the pasta. Needless to say, I'm definitely going to coat working surfaces in more flour.
Special thanks to James Allen for help with some of the photos. He was paid handsomely with a home cooked meal.
