Ravioli

I think homemade pasta is a very special thing. It is absolutely delicious and noticeably more fantastic than the stuff you buy in a box, and because the process of making pasta is tedious and time consuming, making it for someone else truly sends a “you are loved” message. Below is the recipe for ravioli that I made for my family this past holiday.

Sausage and Cheese Ravioli / Spinach and Cheese Ravioli
makes over 100 ravioli – you may want to cut the recipe in half or quarters, unless you’re really hungry!

Cheese

32 oz whole milk ricotta
8 oz shredded mozzarella
1/2 t dried oregano
1/4 t garlic powder
1/4 t salt
1/4 t ground pepper
pinch of cayenne, or more – but don’t leave it out!

Spinach
10 oz package of frozen spinach, thawed and drained well

Sausage
8 oz (or half of a 16oz package) Jimmy Dean hot sausage, cooked

To make the fillings, I first combined all ingredients to make the cheese filling, constantly tasting to ensure that seasoning was just right. I recommend that you do the same. This recipe will make over two pounds of filling, or ping. I separated the ping into two bowls, each with one pound of filling, and added spinach to one bowl and sausage to the other. I left the remaining ping uncontaminated in order to make simple cheese ravioli. I refrigerated the ping until I was ready to make ravioli.

I used Tyler Florence’s pasta dough recipe exactly as written. Because I rolled out the dough very thin, I was able to get double the ravioli per batch. If you’re looking to use all of your ping, you will want to make about two and a half batches of pasta dough. I used a scant tablespoon of ping per ravioli, and that was probably too much.

I’m definitely no ravioli expert, but I think these came out fairly well for my first time making them completely on my own. I did use a pasta roller and borrowed muscle for the rolling process. I used A LOT of flour. I fork-crimped my ravioli edges, sometimes poorly, which was a bad thing because the filling can ooze out when the ravioli is boiled. Because I made over 100 ravioli, I laid them out on cookie sheets and froze them overnight before packaging them into containers.

I found that boiling them was less about time and more about appearance. Pasta color changes as it cooks, so I just watched for my ravioli to float and uniformly change in color. Maybe 5-6 minutes for fresh, and a little longer for frozen.

By all means, if you have any questions, leave a comment below, and I’ll do my best to answer!