After yesterday's pasta dough calamity, I hoped today would be more successful. I chose a mushroom and ricotta cheese filling for my ravioli, seeing as how much I love both mushrooms and ricotta. I searched and I searched until I found a suitable recipe for my filling that was both mushroom-y as well as cheese-y. Since I knew my pasta dough wouldn't be that good, I had to make sure the stuff inside of the ravioli made up for it. I figured that making the filling would be much easier and much less time consuming than the pasta dough...which was true.
The (non-cheese) ingredients seemed pretty basic- mushrooms, onion, and garlic. The only problem was that they said to use 4 ounces of crimini mushrooms, and quite honestly, I don't know what 4 ounces of mushrooms look like. I eyeballed it, according to the weight stated on the package of my mushrooms, but I knew I wasn't very close. And also, I chose my own preference of mushrooms because, well, this is my ravioli.
I probably went a little bit overboard, because I chopped the mushrooms for about 10 minutes making sure each piece was equal in size to all the others. I wanted to make sure each ravioli had the exact same amount of mushrooms and that none of them had chunky 'shrooms either.
My garlic and onion, both of which were also finely and evenly chopped.
So now that I had everything prepared (probably after a grueling 20 minutes of chopping), I set them aside to get my pan ready. I am probably the slowest cook ever. I need to make sure everything is exactly ready and exactly perfect, and not to mention I need to take a ton of breaks to grab my camera and take photos. Basically, I take my sweet ass time.
So first I put oil into my pan, let it sit until it gets hot, and then I added my onion. Shortly after, I added my perfectly chopped mushrooms. Meanwhile, I'm continuously running back and forth trying to take photos while not burning my 'shrooms.
And so this is what it looks like after taking everything out of the pan. Looks good so far, but all that is missing is the cheese!
Once again, I followed the instructions exactly and measured my ingredients precisely, as if I was baking something.
And this is the final filling product. It looks good, but it's a bit more ricotta-cheese-y than mushroom-y. I knew I under-estimated 4 ounces of mushrooms.
Anyways, back to my ravioli. I placed out my pre-cut squares from the day before, and readied my egg wash.
After filling a few of them, I looked at my bundle of handmade ravs and I was really proud. They honestly do look like raviolis. The only question now was... Do they taste like raviolis? So I took one lonely ravioli and dropped him in my pot of salted boiling water to be my taste tester.
Meanwhile, I still proceeded to spit out more and more raviolis. These were definitely the weak links of the bunch. These sad looking ravs ended up not joining their friends and were dropped into the garbage bin.
After my lonely taste tester rose to the top of the water, I took him out and began to examine him. He appeared to look and feel like a ravioli, but he seemed to be a bit more on the really al dente side.
Yup, just as I expected- he's too al dente. The dough was just too thick. I figured if I let the rest of them boil for a bit longer, that would at least help them out. But I knew I had to make my dough a lot thinner for my next batch of raviolis.
So I boiled my first batch of ravioli extra long, because they were the thick ones. But my next batch, seen here, came out a lot better because I rolled the dough out extra thin.
Okay so they're better now, but they're not perfect. I couldn't get the filling as well stuffed as I wanted, and there was definitely too much hanging pasta dough around the edges.
While I was preparing the raviolis, I asked my mom to make a white wine sauce for me because I didn't have enough time to finish everything before dinner. Her sauce was actually very tasty, and I only wish that I made it myself.
My parents told me that the filling tasted delicious, and that the pasta dough was fine but it was just too thick. Now I know for the future to roll it out as thin as possible and to also fill them as much as possible. But that is, if I ever do decide to make pasta dough again (which is probably not likely). We saved the remaining mushroom-ricotta-filling in case we wanted to do something else with it.
---RECIPE---
Ravioli filling taken from Evil Shenanigans.
ingredients:
1 cup ricotta cheese
1 tablespoon olive oil
4 ounces crimini mushrooms, chopped (I used bella mushrooms, and I wouldn't know if I used 4 ounces or not)
1/2 cup chopped yellow onion
2 cloves garlic, minced
Salt and pepper
1/4 cup parmesan cheese
directions:
1. Heat the olive oil in a pan over medium heat. Once it shimmers add the onions and cook until they soften, about five minutes. Add the mushrooms and cook until the excess liquid has evaporated and the mushrooms have reduced in volume, about eight minutes. Add the garlic and cook for thirty seconds. Remove the pan from the heat to cool slightly.
2. In a bowl add the ricotta, salt, pepper, and parmesan cheese. Stir in the mushrooms. Cover and chill while you make the pasta.
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