My sister and I were out at an outlet mall the other day with our mom, grandma, and aunt, and there are a few really nice stores there that sell cookware. As soon as we saw the Remy Olivier pasta machine on sale for only $30 at Stokes, we knew we had to have it. We haven't made much pasta in the past, and not very successfully, but the pasta machine makes it very easy to roll out pasta dough (as long as you don't let the dough dry out too much). We also managed to find an Adamo Imports ravioli stamp at another store, so we were of course really excited to give these kitchen gadgets a try. This meant making butternut squash ravioli with a garlic cream sauce! You can find the recipe and a helpful tutorial here: http://www.laurenslatest.com/how-to-make-ravioli-from-scratch-a-tutorial/. We've never made ravioli before, so we are shocked at how successful we were.
The tutorial provides readers with two filling options for ravioli, but Jennifer and I really liked the sound of the butternut squash filling, so that's what we went with. We didn't bother with boiling the squash in chicken stock, however, and instead roasted the halved butternut squash with a bit of olive oil. This took around an hour to get nice and soft.
Then we pureed the butternut squash with the other ingredients, which include ricotta, egg, salt and pepper, and an onion and garlic mixture. We added a pinch of nutmeg instead of the ground thyme that the recipe calls for.
The ricotta really lightened up the squash, so the colour almost reminds me of egg yolk. We refrigerated the filling while we worked on our pasta dough.
The pasta dough is fairly simple to make. All it is is flour, eggs, salt, and olive oil, which you mix up, knead, and allow to rest for 30 minutes. We made two batches of the pasta dough recipe to feed four people, and I'd say that's roughly what you want. In the end, we each had about 10 raviolis and they're very filling.
We were really impressed by our pasta machine, which rolled out the fresh pasta dough very easily. We found we had problems with the last bit of dough though (which we had wrapped up), and we suspect it dried out a bit while we were working on assembling the rest of our raviolis. We were able to rescue some bits of dough by rolling them out with a rolling pin before putting them through the machine. Whereas the slightly dry dough was tearing as it went through the pasta machine before, the dried out dough we rolled out with a rolling pin actually went through the machine smoothly.
Once our pasta dough was thin enough, we laid out strips one at a time and piped the filling onto them. We used our stamp as a guide for how many raviolis we could get out of each batch of dough. We then folded the dough over our piped filling and pressed the stamp around the filling. You can see Jennifer stamping out the dough above. We were really impressed with our ravioli stamp, because it not only cuts out the shape of the ravioli, but automatically seals them. I suspect that saved us a lot of time that we otherwise would have spent struggling to seal the raviolis.
While we assembled our raviolis, we had the others on a floured baking sheet and covered with plastic to prevent them from drying out.
We decided to cook the raviolis in smaller amounts because we were worried about them sticking together. This meant cooking roughly 10 raviolis at a time. We also cooked them at a gentle boil to prevent them from opening. Once they were done cooking, which was when they were floating on the top, we set them aside on a plate. Then we put the next batch in to cook.
When all the raviolis were cooked, we drained the pot and placed the raviolis back in. Then we added the ingredients for our garlic sauce, which included cream, garlic, Parmesan cheese, and salt and pepper. The sauce thickened quickly, and then we were ready to serve.
The ravioli were delicious. The garlic sauce was amazing. Jennifer and I would really like to try a sage and butter sauce next time, since that more traditionally goes with a butternut squash filling, but we'll definitely be using the garlic cream sauce again. I think it would make a great sauce for fettuccine, or ravioli with a cheese-based filling. We followed the recipe exactly for roughly how many ingredients we needed for the sauce per 12 raviolis, and it turned out perfect. I should also add that for 40 raviolis we managed to use the full recipe of butternut squash filling, so if you're wondering about amounts you need, that should help you figure out how much you need. I highly recommend these recipes for the pasta dough, filling, and sauce!
