Date Completed: 9/16/2024, 11/23/2024, 4/4/2024

Book: America’s Test Kitchen 20th Anniversary TV Show Cookbook

Chapter: Pasta

Overall Score: 9/12

Recommended? It depends! If you like making ravioli for a quick dinner, this isn’t for you! If making homemade pasta interests you, then I 100% recommend this recipe! Despite giving it a Process score of 1 - Question Your Sanity, I’ve made it three times in six months. It’s that special!

To be clear: I love ravioli. All ravioli. Meat ravioli, cheese ravioli, toasted ravioli, boiled ravioli, shortbread cookie ravioli. Call it ravioli, and I am down!

When I was in high school, I took a cooking class where we made toasted ravioli from scratch: the filling, the pasta dough, the assembly, and the frying. A quintessentially St. Louis cooking class, indeed! Ever since then, I’ve wanted to make ravioli at home. It just speaks to my soul!

We’ve already made homemade pasta noodles a few times, and they always turn out delicious! I was confident that I could apply that pasta dough experience to this ravioli project!

Process Report:

Process Score: 1 - Question Your Sanity

Ha! I quickly learned that it takes a real dedication to the self-concept of being a homemade ravioli maker to make this recipe. Some steps are easy. Others are tricky. It’s all time-consuming!

I make the pasta dough first by combining flour and egg yolks in the food processor. After my first round of making the dough, I started adding a little salt in this step to boost the final flavor. It only takes a few minutes for the dough to come together, but the recipe recommends resting it for one to four hours. I’ve had good luck going with the full, four-hour rest period.

In that time, you need to wash your food processor so that you can use it again to combine the pork filling. The star ingredients are ground pork, lemon, garlic, parsley, and ground fennel. This can then sit in the refrigerator until you’re ready to roll!

At this point, I’m always feeling good. Thinking this is so easy!

The hard part starts with the rolling process. Here’s where you need two doses of patience and maybe a good audiobook to listen to.

After dividing the dough into six equal portions (I admit I used a kitchen scale to get them exactly even. See Process Score: 1 - Question Your Sanity).

You roll each portion into a thin-enough-to-see-through rectangle that measures 6 by 18 inches. This step is why I like to wait the full four hours so that the dough is as relaxed as possible.

The recipe directs you to roll out all six pieces into rectangles, stacking them on a baking sheet with parchment between every two layers. I can’t stress enough how much I do not agree with this advice! The first time I made the recipe, many of my layers stuck together, especially the two on the bottom of the stack. I would even say you could do the full assembly process for each piece of dough before moving on to the next.

So what is the rest of the process? You can use a knife to square off the rounded edges of the rectangle. Then brush egg white on the bottom half - a great use for a few of the extra whites leftover from making the dough originally! I found using a tablespoon helped me dollop even portions of the pork filling onto the dough. Something I appreciate about this recipe is that, if you portion it out with a tablespoon, you use pretty much all of the filling mixture. No extra filling to figure out a secondary use for!

You make vertical cuts to separate each dollop of filling onto its own dough island, and then gently fold the dough over it to seal. The egg white is a very effective binder! I also like to use a fluted pastry wheel to make the pretty edges at this point.

You can put the raviolis on a baking sheet to wait for the others to be finished. Then, just repeat that five more times. Again, I typically feel pretty good after doing this once or twice. By the third time, I’m starting to wonder about my sanity. By the fourth time, I’m fully questioning. And by the fifth, I’m pretty sure I’m insane for doing this. But then it’s over, and you’re so close to having homemade ravioli!

To fully cook, they are boiled for about 13 minutes, until the filling reaches 165 degrees and the pasta reaches your preferred texture!

Taste Report:

Taste Score: 3 - Special

Unbelievable. Special by all accounts. Here’s where it all becomes worth it. These ravioli are so gosh darn delicious! I love the lemon and herbs in the pork filling because they add freshness. The pasta is so good, especially with the addition of plenty of salt in the cooking water. The directions help you get the pasta dough to the right thickness, so the final texture is awesome.

They are just so much fun to eat, too! Ravioli makes such a fun presentation!

ATK also provides a fabulous tomato sauce recipe to serve with these. That starts with onions sautéed in butter and ends with fresh basil, so you know it’s delectable!

I think making these is an ultimate expression of love for your dinner guests! At least it is for me!

Mess Report:

Mess Score: 2 - Moderate

You do have to clean your food processor in the middle of the process, but I’ve admittedly just wiped it out after assembling the pasta dough to reduce the dishwashing required. Otherwise, it’s one that takes a lot of kitchen counter space to make, but not a huge amount of dishes.

Leftover Report:

Leftover Score: 3 - Feast

Here’s the thing that makes this recipe attainable (stay with me!). You can assemble the raviolis in advance and freeze them until ready to cook! It’s so easy! You can flash freeze them on the baking sheet and then transfer them to a freezer bag. They can be boiled straight from the freezer without much or any additional cooking time required. The tomato sauce also freezes beautifully. Truly a game-changer!

I did that for Thanksgiving last year. These ravioli were my Wednesday night meal for my family after a long day of cooking. But! All I had to do that day was boil the ravioli and heat up the sauce. Next to no work at all! I served them with a side salad, some bread, and individual butter candles for each person (a really magical recipe for another time).

But back to ravioli! This recipe also scores points because the cooked leftovers are also excellent for days afterwards. Just toss in the microwave and enjoy!

And that’s my case for why you should join me in the questioning-your-sanity-while-hand-rolling-ravioli club. Or just come for dinner the next time I decide to put these together?!