Today isn’t about the recipe, it’s a rundown of several techniques for making ravioli. I’ll put the recipe for the filling up the next time my father-in-law makes it. It was already made before I showed up with the camera.
In the clips below I’m working with my father-in-law, Lou. His mother and her sisters would spend several days each fall making thousands of ravioli and freezing them to use through the holidays. When I say thousands, I’m talking about 12-14,000 ravioli. And yes, they’d count them all.
We spent a day on it and made … fewer. We didn’t figure out the right technique until right near the end. Then we found the video my wife shot of Nana and the aunts making them before we were married. Turns out the method we ended up with is exactly what they did. Guess they knew what they were doing.
Ingredients
This is the basic pasta dough, 3/4 cup of white flour and a teaspoon of salt per egg. The filling was bread crumbs, Parmesan cheese and tomato sauce. Once I get the exact recipe I’ll do another post where I make the filling, too.
Directions
The pasta
You can check out the post about making egg noodles for some video clips of actually making the pasta. The steps are exactly the same. Crack the eggs into the mixer and stir briefly.
Then add the flour and salt and mix again.
Once it’s mixed, remove the beater attachment and scrape off all the dough that stuck to it.
The dough hook will work, but it will take about three times as long to finish mixing it well.
And of course you still need to finish with some hand-kneading.
The tray
Here is where we started experimenting with different techniques. First was a tray that makes perfect little square ravioli. (You can see it up in the ingredients photo.) We put the filling in a pastry shooter to make it easier. That was a good call. Definitely keep that one.
You can see in this video how easy it was to fill them.
Then just lay another piece of pasta across the top and roll it with a rolling pin to crimp the edges.
Peel the excess off and knock them out of the tray.
Except they stuck. Really badly. Yes, we tried flouring it. We tried oiling it. It just stuck every time.
Okay, so let’s try it freestyle.
Two strips
Next we rolled out one long piece of pasta and cut it in half lengthwise. Deposit the filling down one half and cover it with the other half.
Press down on either side of the filling so the pasta doesn’t rip when you cut it.
Or press down after each center as you lay the strip down.
That worked pretty well. But it was still an extra step we didn’t need. Here’s what we finally came up with.
The winner
Oops. Shouldn’t kick the tripod. Let’s try that again.
That little tool I’m using is a ravioli cutter from the local Italian market. Yes, when making Italian food, it pays to find out what real Italians use to make it. Seems obvious, doesn’t it?
So here’s what we spent all day making.
That also has some of the noodles we started cutting once we ran out of filling. Believe it or not, after all that we didn’t actually eat any of them for over a week. And when we did it was in soup, not with red sauce as the main course.
I’ll be back soon with the recipe for the filling, and the broth for the soup. Until then, you’re just going to have to trust me that it was delicious.
Want more like this? For more recipes like this, that you can hold right in your hands, and write on, take notes, tear pages out if you want (Gosh, you're tough on books, aren't you?) you might be interested in How To Cook Like Your Grandmother, 2nd edition, Illustrated. Or to learn your way around the kitchen, check out Starting From Scratch: The Owner's Manual for Your Kitchen.
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18 Comments
how long does dried pasta/ravioli keep (in the fridge, I imagine)
Actually we freeze it. Lou has a chest freezer in the basement that we call the Mafia model: Enough room for three people. The ones we got from Nana, we’ve kept for months.
Man, I haven’t had homemade ravioli in forever. I trust you that they were delicious, but I still want to know the recipe!
Yeah. When my husband was looking at the recipe we’re using for our first attempt at pasta-making, he saw the variation for ravioli, and immediately told me I should make ravioli. To which I replied, “No.”
Maybe I’ll show him this and he can make it himself. SNORT. Like that’ll happen.
If I can actually master rolling out the dough, MAYBE I’ll try making ravioli. Sometime when I feel I have enough time on my hands and a lot of patience.
Bob, the problem is Nana never measured. We’re running the videotape back and forth trying to figure out what the hell she was doing.
Kristin, don’t do ravioli on your first attempt with pasta. Seriously.
OK, so now (once I get my new kitchen when we build the new house which should be sometime after we win the lottery) I will be making batches of ravioli along with the chili & gumbo. I'm gonna need a new shed to hold the new chest freezers!
Stephanie, you know you have to actually buy lottery tickets to win it, right? Those things you get in your inbox saying your email address already won the international lottery are a scam.
Drew, you have a real factory in operation here! I love pasta making but haven’t had the patience with ravioli recently! How do you handle the taglitelli? I tried whirling it into bundles once but it all stuck together!
Fiona, that’s something I just learned from Lou. He’d never done it, but he remembered watching his mother spread flour on the table before laying the fresh-cut pasta down, then sprinkling more flour on top. Once it was dry enough to not stick together, shake out the excess flour and you’re good to go.
I’m sure the commercial processes are more based on getting the moisture content of the pasta just right so it holds together without sticking. But “commercial process” usually means high-pressure extruded noodles, which don’t absorb the sauce as well as cut pasta.
I wanted to share this idea with your readers, when making egg noodles with a pasta machine. put the dough thru several numbers from lg to sm. when you have a long strip about 10 to 12 inches. put a pot of simmering water on the stove, and on top of that a cookie sheet. Then put your pastat on the cookie sheet to dry it out some and while still warm run it thru the cutter, then just sprinkle your noodles out on a sheet on a bed and let them dry out. Once they are fully dry about a day or two, then you can put them in bags and store them for a long time Lakemyst
Drew, I know that very well.
my husband says we’ll earn our money the old fashion way….inherit it. 
Have you picked out the rich relative to circle over like a vulture, or are you still missing a step in your plan?
He keeps thinking there’s a rich uncle somewhere. He dreams quite a bit, but works real hard so there’s a balance.
I’m still gobsmacked at the idea of making 14,000 ravioli….
Keri, I think I’m more amazed that they count them all. And I don’t mean estimate, they counted them.
Drew,
The filling with pastry shooter/press seems so easy. What brand and model do you use on your video? I like large size as well. Thanks in advance.
Alex
That’s a Pampered Chef cookie press.
I wonder if those Ravioli trays “season” over time? My wife just made a bunch of butternut squash ravioli using one, and there was very little sticking – but the thing she was using was probably old when Coolidge was president.