Ravioli Gone Wrong

We all know, I have never claimed to be a chef, nor to even know how to really cook for that matter. As I mentioned back in January, one of my New Year's resolutions was to become more savvy in the kitchen or at least attempt to add a few more items to my typical menu. It was my boyfriend's b'day a week or so ago so I figured, why not try to make him a special dinner. I decided I would use my brother as a guinea pig. I was going to make homemade ravioli with goat cheese and pine nut filling with a brown butter sage sauce. Sounds tasty, right? I know. That's why I was so excited to get home from work and get started. Anyway, I searched numerous recipes online and they seemed fairly similar so I went with the unbleached all-purpose flour egg mixture for dough. I went ahead and substituted the pine nuts ($12!?) for marcona almonds because they were half the price ($6). I stuck to the recipe for the brown butter sage sauce.

I followed the recipe for the dough exactly. Make a heap with the flour (6 cups), make a well in the heap. Crack eggs (6 of them) into heap. Beat them. Then begin to mix in the flour from the bottom of the heap then work outwards. The dough will become sticky and you may need to add flour.... not so much in my case. The mixture was more or less dry and flaky. Some parts stuck together and slightly resembled dough but the majority seemed like a uneven mess. Not knowing quite what to do, I added more eggs. I thought, hey, if it says its too gooey add flour, so if it is too dry I figured why not add eggs. And in the eggs went... one, two, three of them. Finally the concoction at least looked like dough. I kneaded it and kneaded it and my arms began to hurt and I started realizing how dumb I was to think I could make this.  Eventually after lots of arm work, I had myself a ball of dough (actually, two balls of dough). I wrapped them in plastic and let them sit for 30 minutes in the fridge (one of the recipes said to do this).

While it was "resting", I mixed my Vermont goat cheese with my chopped marcona almonds for the filling. I then began to roll the dough out, or at least I tried. Not only did I not have a pasta machine, I also didn't have a rolling pin so I decided to use an empty bottle of wine (brilliant, I thought!). Not really the result I wanted. The dough was tough and very difficult to roll out. The recipe said to roll it out to 1/16 inches thick. I thought that's what I had done, but I must have been wrong, because after cutting my raviolis into cute heart shapes (with the help of my cookie cutter), they looked much more like dumplings than any raviolis I've ever seen. Furthermore, they cooked more like dumplings as well, or how I think dumplings would cook since clearly I've never made them before.

The 3-5 minutes the raviolis should boil ended up taking about 45 minutes at which point my brother just started fishing them out of the water, cutting them open, scraping out the warm goat cheese filling and spreading it on cracker. It made a much better dip than pasta dish, though I'm pretty sure there was a quicker way to make the cracker spread than attempting homemade raviolis.

Fortunately, I am persistent, and rather than let the rest of the dough go to waste, I decided to give it one last shot.  I fashioned the remainder into normal square-shaped pillows. This did work out much better, though they were by no means perfect. The pasta was still too doughy and took too long to cook. This did, however, give me the chance to make the brown butter sage sauce, which turned out to be delicious (n.b. it only took about half of the 1/4 cup chopped sage leaves indicated in the recipe).

Lessons learned: I have decided to toss out the empty wine bottle and purchase a pasta maker (only about $24 on amazon, see my piggy store in the sidebar). Given that at the end of the night I was content with the filling and sauce, I think I really need some help with the actual pasta and this should do the trick.

If you have any suggestions for my pasta endeavors, please post them below. Oink!