Pizza Today - July 2015 - 40

MAKING HOMEMADE RAVIOLI CAN
BE A BIT TIME CONSUMING and perhaps

a tad frustrating at first. It could actually
discourage you from trying it again. Don't
give up!
I want to teach you some techniques
and amazing fillings that will leave your
customers craving more.
Let's talk about how to make and roll
out your pasta dough for ravioli. The
dough is simple. It's just like making any
pasta dough. Some cooks use white flour

and eggs. Although that works very well,
I love to use semolina flour and warm
water. You can also mix white flour and
semolina or even some whole-wheat
flour. You can add an egg and then your
water. How you are going to roll out your
dough will determine how tight or soft
you'll make it. If you will roll out your
dough with a rolling pin on a flour-coated
workbench, you'll want your dough to be
soft enough to work.
Another option is to run the dough

through a sheeter or roller by a hand
crank or even an attachment to a mixer,
which would require your dough to be a
bit stiffer.
The third way is to use an extruder
with a lasagna noodle attachment that
you would use to mix your dough in the
hopper. In this case, your mixture would
be more of a granular texture before you
extrude and not really a dough at all.
REGARDLESS OF WHICH TECHNIQUE
YOU USE, you will end up with a thin

sheet of pasta dough about six inches
wide and however long you want
to make it while still fitting on your
counter. You can make a second sheet
the same size so one sheet will be the
bottom and the second sheet will be
the top of the ravioli. You'll be able to
get two rows of filled ravioli per sheet,
unless you want to fill one side of the
sheet and then fold the other half of the
sheet over the filled side.
When filling ravioli, you want to
brush some egg wash on the bottom
layer of the pasta sheet. This will act
as the glue. Deposit your filling with a
spoon or small portion scoop and then
carefully put the second layer of pasta
over the filled bottom layer. Carefully
push any air out to the edges and allow
the pasta sheets to seal.
THERE ARE A FEW WAYS TO CUT
YOUR RAVIOLI. You can use a round or

square ravioli cutter, punching out each
ravioli one at a time. Or you can use
a straight or zigzag edged roller cutter
to separate the ravioli, and a raviolicutting rolling pin.
You can also cut squares of pasta
about the size of a wonton wrapper (as
a matter of ease, you can use a wonton
wrapper to make ravioli). After depositing the filling, you can fold the ravioli
once from one corner to another creating a triangle-shaped ravioli.
After your ravioli are cut, it's very
important to let them rest either in the
refrigerator or even the freezer to allow
the edges to seal properly so they don't
open up during the boiling process and
lose their filling.

4 0 / P I Z Z AT O D AY. C O M / J U LY 2 0 1 5
http://www.caputocheese.com http://www.caputocheese.com http://www.PIZZATODAY.COM
Pizza Today - July 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pizza Today - July 2015
