Ravioli

Ravioli is a classic Italian dish, a cross between pasta and small dumplings. Ravioli (or full pasta) is prepared throughout Italy ^[1]. They put different fillings and make them in different shapes. This dish is served in Italian restaurants around the world as a hot dish.

Italian dumplings are prepared from unleavened dough and a wide variety of fillings – meat, fish, tomatoes, potatoes, artichokes, spinach, mushrooms and even fruits ^[2]. The most popular version contains chicken, Parmesan and chopped greens. The shape of the finished ravioli can vary from an ellipse, a circle, a crescent to a square. The edge of the products is always curly cut for a beautiful presentation. ^[3].

Ravioli is boiled or fried. When cooked, the dish is sprinkled with grated cheese before serving, poured with tomato sauce or seasoned with butter, olives or sage are added, depending on the filling. In the homeland of ravioli, a sauce is selected for them based on the region where the dish is prepared.

Often in restaurants you can try “full pasta” with classic pesto sauce. Ravioli fried in oil are added to all kinds of soups, broths, cream soups, which emphasize the taste of their filling.

The calorie content of meat ravioli is about 245 kilocalories per 100 grams of product. The composition of the nutrients of this dish may vary depending on the filling, but in general, all ravioli contain a vitamin and mineral complex, including vitamins of groups B, A, C, D, E, PP, micro and macro elements ^{[4] [5]}.

Classic dish recipe

Today, ravioli recipes have become popular, which can be prepared at home in a short time. ^[6]. To make ravioli, you will need a little more than 3 cups of flour and 3 eggs for dough, a ravioli machine and any stuffing. It is worth trying the classic Italian version – ravioli with ricotta cheese. This dish is very tasty and tender.

The dough for ravioli is prepared as follows: first you need to pour the flour in a slide on the table, then make a wide recess in it, so that only the walls in a circle remain. In a separate bowl, mix 3 eggs thoroughly with a fork and pour them into the hole in the flour slide. Next, it is necessary to gradually add flour from the walls of an impromptu slide to the egg mixture. After that, you can continue kneading the dough with your hands. The process should continue until the dough becomes smooth and elastic. It should be wrapped in cling film and left to rest for about an hour at room temperature. The readiness of the dough for ravioli is determined as follows: it quickly returns to its original shape when pressed with your fingers.

Next, you need a ravioli machine. Initially, the dough is passed through the largest hole, folded in half and again passed through the hole with the same size. Then the thickness of the hole in the machine is reduced. This must be done until the dough passes through the smallest gap of the machine. If you don’t have a ravioli machine, you can roll out the dough by hand using a rolling pin. To get the thinnest layer, before each new rolling, the finished rolled dough must be folded in half.

The rolled dough is cut into small squares. If you use ricotta as a filling, then before adding it to the dough, it is mixed in a blender along with green peas and garlic. Homogeneous cheese mass with the help of a culinary bag is laid out in small portions on the dough squares. Too much filling will spoil the finished ravioli, as the contents of the dough will begin to flow during cooking and tear at the edges. The filled Italian dumplings are pinched around the edges and boiled for 3 minutes in salted boiling water.

Homemade guanchale with cream and pecorino cheese can be used as a classic Italian sauce for ravioli. Guanchale is dry-cured pork cheeks, which are fried in olive oil until golden brown for sauce. Then garlic is added to them, and they languish a little more on the fire. At this time, cream, eggs, black pepper and pecorino cheese are mixed in a separate container. At the end of cooking, green peas, chopped green onions and boiled ravioli are added to the garlic guanchala. There is also poured a little water in which they were cooked. All ingredients are simmered in a pan for about 1 minute, and then laid out in a sauce of cream with pecorino. It is recommended to sprinkle the finished dish with grated parmesan.

If you add spinach to ricotta instead of green peas, you get another kind of “full pasta”.

Spinach ravioli is very useful for maintaining youth and beauty, so many women love this type of Italian dumplings.

Varieties of fillings for the dish

Ravioli can be eaten as a first course, second course, and even dessert. It all depends on the filling that the chef added to the dough during cooking. The dough itself is neutral and fresh, so it will perfectly complement the taste of any filling. According to the reviews of restaurateurs, in addition to meat, mushroom and chocolate ravioli are popular.

Dough for ravioli with mushrooms is prepared according to the recipe for making classic ravioli. To prepare a delicious mushroom filling, you need to finely chopped mushrooms and onions, fry in a pan in butter until all the liquid has completely evaporated. Then the mushrooms with onions should cool. Only after that they are sprinkled with salt, pepper and spices.

But ravioli with mushrooms are formed a little differently. All the dough is cut into two layers of the same shape. Mushrooms with onions are laid out on one layer of dough in small portions, between which gaps must be left. These gaps are smeared with a beaten egg. A layer of dough with mushrooms is covered with an empty layer. Both layers are well pressed against each other so that the parts smeared with the egg mixture stick together. Next, the ravioli of the desired shape are cut with a knife so that the mushroom filling gets into each mold. The dish is cooked for about 10 minutes in salted boiling water, served with any suitable sauce.

For dessert, many people prefer chocolate ravioli. This dessert is very unusual due to the presentation and taste. To prepare them, you need to take one and a half cups of flour, 3-4 eggs, a quarter cup of cocoa powder, 2 tablespoons of sugar, grated milk chocolate, cream and salt. For the filling, you need 180 grams of milk chocolate, an egg and 3 cups of unsalted cheese or cottage cheese.

Chocolate ravioli dough and filling are prepared as follows:

1. Sugar with flour, salt, cocoa and eggs are mixed. The resulting dough is kneaded by hand until smooth. After obtaining the desired consistency, the dough is wrapped with a film and left to rest for half an hour.
2. The aged dough is divided into two equal parts, rolled into rectangles on a table surface sprinkled with flour, and covered with a damp towel.
3. To prepare the filling, melt the chocolate and mix with cottage cheese and egg.
4. A damp towel is removed from one rectangle of dough and the toppings are laid out over its entire surface at a distance of 4 centimeters from each other. Brush the loose dough between the fillings with beaten eggs.
5. The second rectangle of dough is released from the wet towel and the layer with the filling is covered with it. The two layers are tightly pressed against each other.
6. With a knife, a glass or special culinary forms, ready-made ravioli are cut out. The shape for ravioli is not too important, but for sweets, circles that look like candy are more often chosen.
7. On a flat surface, previously sprinkled with flour, lay out the cut blanks, cover them and leave to lie at room temperature for about 1 hour.
8. Chocolate blanks are boiled in boiling water, served with whipped cream and decorated with grated chocolate.

As you can see from the recipe, ravioli with chocolate differ from the classic ones not only in the filling, but also in the composition of the dough.

Almost everyone knows how to cook ravioli with chicken or meat. The dough recipe is used as for classic ravioli, and minced meat is prepared in the same way as for dumplings familiar to everyone.

Secrets of cooking

A lot in the recipe of the dish in question depends on how high-quality the dough turned out to be from the hostess. To obtain an elastic, dense, easy-to-roll dough, two rules must be observed. Firstly, the dough is kneaded with very cold hands, for which the cooks periodically wash their hands in ice water, wipe them dry and continue to knead the dough. The second prerequisite is also related to the cold. In the kitchen, when preparing this dish, it must be cold, otherwise the cook will not be able to roll out the dough well, and the already cut ravioli bases will be covered with a dry crust.

Pasta ravioli, as it is called in Italy, is sometimes prepared with simple vegetable fillings such as tomatoes, zucchini or potatoes. In this case, it is more like dumplings and is served as an independent second course or side dish for meat.

At home, any ravioli turns out tastier, because you can always control the quality and quantity of all the products that make up the dish. In Italy, it is not customary to cook semi-finished products. Ravioli, unlike dumplings and dumplings, is never frozen, but always cooked before serving. You can involve the whole family in the preparation of the “full pasta”, since kneading the dough is a physically demanding process, and it is difficult for some women, so men should do it. A woman can do the preparation of the filling, but her unfolding and molding molds is a favorite children’s game in the kitchen.

Making ravioli is not too laborious, especially if the hostess has a dough cutting machine. ^[7]. It greatly simplifies the cooking process, allowing you to get the thinnest dough in a matter of minutes. A thickness of less than 1 mm is the norm for rolling ravioli dough. It should be added that although “full pasta” is a flour product, some of its variations do not contain sugar at all. You can also control the amount of salt, so if you follow some diets, ravioli is quite acceptable. The use of this dish will not affect the figure if you use a set of herbs, fresh vegetables, low-fat cheese as a filling for diet ravioli ^{[8] [9]}. One serving of this paste can fill the body’s daily need for proteins and carbohydrates. ^[10].

There are numerous videos on the Internet and on television on how to cook ravioli at home in the same way as dishes are made in the homeland. ^[11]. If there is no time for cooking, you can buy semi-finished ravioli in stores. Basically, this is a variant of the dish with meat, but ravioli can also be found with other fillings. But, of course, a store-bought product can hardly be compared with homemade ravioli.

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