Experiments With Ravioli

Whilst making pasta and ravioli is not exactly baking, it's still an interesting area of cooking that I'd been dying to try out for a while. Not having a pasta roller, I would be rolling out the pasta by hand, something which I knew would produce pasta that was not as good as pasta that's been through a pasta roller. Still, I was undeterred, and luckily found this recipe on the BBC Food website, from an episode of Masterchef. Even better, the recipe called for rolling out the pasta by hand, so I was eager to have a go.

Sweet Potato Ravioli

I am extremely lucky to have the wonderful Freshways two minutes walk from my flat, so getting hold of semolina was incredibly easy. Generally I found this recipe easy to follow, but I did come across a couple of very obvious issues: 1) One egg yolk is definitely not enough for the pasta mix, especially with the amount of semolina the recipe asks for. I ended up using two egg yolks and one egg. 2) The very first time I attempted this, I did not roll the pasta anywhere near thin enough, which meant that the ravioli was not quite cooked all the way through after being boiled for the stated 5 minutes. This was my own stupid fault of course, but luckily did not take too much away from the lovely flavours of the sweet potato and the sage. My friend M happily ate her entire plateful, and was far too tactful to mention the over-thick pasta. I definitely corrected my errors the next time, and the ravioli was given the thumbs up by L and her boyfriend.

A few weeks after I'd first tried making ravioli, I suddenly had the idea to make some unusual ravioli. I was curious about a vague memory I'd had of someone (probably on Masterchef) making a chocolate ravioli dessert. I'd also recently discovered a spread that Waitrose sell, Lotus Caramelised Biscuit Spread (really yummy, well worth a try), which I though could make a great filling for chocolate ravioli. So I had a quick search online, and came across this recipe on Epicurious. I combined this pasta recipe with the one I'd used for the sweet potato ravioli earlier, which meant including semolina along with the egg, flour and cocoa powder. I managed to roll the pasta very thin, and filled each one with a teaspoon of the biscuit spread. I then boiled them for five minutes, and made a simple almond butter to accompany them.

Chocolate Ravioli with Caramelised Biscuit Centre and Almond Butter.  Yum!

This was an immediate success with L, the chocolate flavour of the ravioli not being too overwhelming, and complimenting the caramelised biscuit and the almond butter nicely. I think I may try it with hazelnut butter next time, to see what that flavour combination is like.

It is definitely worth having a go at making pasta even if you don't have a pasta roller - whilst the results may not be quite a good as pasta that has been made using the roller, it can still be quite successful. It certainly went down well enough here.

Beckie.