Today, we are going to be making cheese ravioli. Only, they aren’t going to come out of a bag or a box, I am going to make them by hand, start to finish (I will not hold them while they were boiling, so when I say ‘by hand’, I mean, I will form them by hand and let the boiling water take care of the rest).

Here I am washing my hands. Every cooking show has this shot, I figured I should too. Yes, there are dishes in my sink. No, there are no dishes in the sinks of Food Network shows, but hey, I’m a real person and there is only one dishwasher in my house, my husband, and he was busy taking pictures of me washing my hands. Ha.

Here is a screw that I think came loose from my KitchenAid. I bet the real Giada doesn’t have any screws loose.

This is the filling for my r-r-r-ravioli (that was my rolling my ‘R’).

5 Cheese filling

16 oz Whole milk Ricotta (let’s face it…there is nothing low fat about ravioli so let’s go all out)

8 oz Good quality cream cheese (I use Cabot)

1 cup shredded Mozzarella

1 cup shredded Provolone

1 cup grated Parmigiano Reggiano.

1 large egg and 1 yolk

Some dried parsley…not sure how much, just put some in there.

Mix all the ingredients together until they are sort of smooth.

This is the cheesiest smile i could make while mixing the filling. Please note, I have more kitchen stuff than will fit in this kitchen, therefore, it is always in a state of destruction. I need a kitchen twice this size. Plus, my counters are like 1.5 feet deep and they aren’t level, it’s really really annoying.

You should already have made your pasta sheets (you didn’t know that before now? Sorry.) I used a pretty basic pasta recipe, 3 cups of flour, 3 large eggs and 6 egg yolks, plus a pinch of salt and 3 drops of water. Mix and knead it all together and let sit for an hour. Then roll it out using pasta rollers to the thinnest setting (8 on the kitchenaid rollers), making sure to sprinkle sheets with flour and covering them so they don’t dry out while you roll the rest.

The next step can be done a couple different ways.

1. You can cut the sheets into squares

2. You can use a ravioli press

3. or…you can use a ravioli cutter.

I chose #3. I laid one sheet of pasta out, brushed it with egg white then scooped the mixture onto the sheet and covered it with a second sheet. Then, I cut the ravioli’s. It was a time consuming ordeal.

Scoop the cheese out with a cookie scoop, that way you get nice uniform ravioli’s with the same amount of filling in each. During this photo I was telling my husband that there wasn’t enough light where he was standing to take this photo, this is what I got…not enough light.

Then he started to get a little bit crazy with the camera…here’s an up close shot of the cheese on the pasta.

Cutting the ravioli’s. It took some muscle.

Hanging out before meeting with the boiling water. Boil for 4 minutes.

The final product.

 

 

 

…By the way, they are seriously yum-tastic.

If you have the time, I highly recommend these, they are so good, but you’ll need about 2-3 hours from start to finish.