Adventures in Ravioli Making

Let me start by saying that not every meal can be perfect. I've tried making homemade pasta on multiple occasions and I can never seem to get it quite right. First I tried the pasta maker attachment for my Kitchen Aid mixer. That was a gooey, sticky mess. Both times. Then I tried gnocchi. They ended up overcooked and falling apart. So tonight I thought I'd attempt to hand-make ravioli. It wasn't a complete failure, but let's just say I learned some (more) lessons.

I went back to our trusty Mario Batali cookbook, which did me so well yesterday with the meatloaf. Tonight I was excited to use my new ravioli cutter, so I found an amazing-sounding recipe in the book (and made some minor adjustments because let's be real ... Mario calls for some pretty sophisticated ingredients sometimes). All of my lessons learned are incorporated below.

Ravioli with Chicken, Sausage and Goat Cheese

Pasta Ingredients:
3 1/2 cups flour
5 eggs

Filling Ingredients:
4 tablespoons butter
1/2 white onion, chopped
1/2 lb. ground chicken
1/2 lb. mild Italian sausage
3 tablespoons goat cheese
1/4 cup grated pecorino romano cheese
1 tablespoon dried marjoram
1 tablespoon dried parsley
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
Salt and pepper

Sauce Ingredients:
4 tablespoons butter
1 cup baby portabella mushrooms

Directions:
To make the pasta, Mario says to mound the flour on a large cutting board and make a well in the center. Then, you're supposed to add all 5 eggs to the well and whisk them with a fork. Well, I thought a nice short cut would be to whisk the eggs a bit prior to adding them to the flour (because just tossing them in seemed like it would create a giant mess).

I proceeded to make a giant mess. Either my well wasn't deep enough or whisking the eggs was a bad idea, because it overflowed and I ended up with a puddle here, a puddle there. So I just got to work mixing in the flour. According to Mario, you should work in the flour and continuously shape the well until the dough starts to come together. I just kept mixing the mess until it began to come together.

Mario says it's very important to knead the pasta dough for 10 minutes to result in a silken texture. So, like I did with my bread dough, I set the kitchen timer and got to work. My arms were sore at the end, but the dough came together pretty well. I wrapped the dough in plastic and set it aside for 30 minutes.

To make the filling, melt the butter in a skillet and add the onion. Cook until very soft, about 7 to 8 minutes. Add the chicken and sausage and cook until no longer pink, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat and cool.

Put chicken-sausage mixture in food processor and pulse until mixture is fine, almost paste-like (I'd compare the texture to a coarse pate). Combine goat cheese, romano, marhoram, parsley, nutmeg, salt and pepper in a large bowl. Add chicken-sausage mixture and stir until well-combined.

Now here comes the tricky part. To roll out the dough, you're supposed to feed it through a pasta machine. My Kicthen Aid pasta attachment doesn't have a sheet attachment, so I thought I could break out the old rolling pin. Now, you're supposed to roll the dough to about a 1/4-inch thickness BEFORE passing it through the machine. I got Bill's muscles in on the action and between the two of us, we probably came away with two sheets of dough that were about a 1/4-inch thick. And for the sake of our arms, we had to stop there.

This ravioli cutter I bought from Crate and Barrel wasn't as easy as I thought it would be either. It took a bit of strength to cut through the dough, but I'm not sure if the trouble was the tickness of the dough or the lack of sharpness of the cutter.

Technically, the recipe asks you to place teaspoonfuls of filling about a 1/2-inch apart on one sheet, top it with the other sheet and use a ravioli cutter to cut around the filling. Given the thickness of my dough, I wasn't so sure that was going to happen, so instead I cut through the single sheets, placed teaspoonfuls of dough on one dough slice, dampened the edges, topped it with another dough slice, and used a fork to seal the edges.

I dropped them in a pot of boiling water. Mario's ravioli take about 3 to 4 minutes to cook. I decided to judge their doneness by when they floated to the top of the pot. I'm not exactly sure how long that took, but it was certainly more than 3 to 4 minutes.

While the ravioli were boiling, I made the sauce. This part is super simple. Melt the remaining 4 tablespoons butter in a skillet over medium heat, add the mushrooms, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cook until soft. When the ravioli floated, I drained them and added them to the pan with the mushroom-butter sauce.


So the ravioli were a bit tough. No doubt this was because my dough wasn't rolled as it should have been. I've decided that I absolutely need to go out and get myself an old-fashioned pasta maker ... the kind with a crank handle. That will still be a workout, but I think the end result will be worth it.

Luckily, the ravioli filling was delish, as was the mushroom sauce. And actually, the pasta wasn't so bad if you split the ravioli and ate a single layer at a time. Still, I was disappointed that I didn't get homemade pasta right ... again.

Thank goodness we were able to end the meal on a high note because I had made espresso creme brulee again. And this time, I had butane for my torch! I used it to create a very tasty sugar crust, which definitely took the brulee up a notch. Plus, playing with fire was tons of fun :)

Oh no, Risotto!

I was going to start this post my saying risotto is hard to make. But it turns out it's not! Just like working with yeast, it simply requires a ton of patience.

I like risotto, but I'd never say I love it. That's mostly because every time I've ordered it, it's turned out to be ... gooey. In my head, risotto should be light and fluffy and delicious. But more often than not, the risotto I've experienced has been sticky and heavy and just kind of "eh." I came across a recipe in my "America's Test Kitchen: Cooking for Two" cookbook yesterday, and decided to give it a go because the picture looked so yummy.

Here's the recipe, with commentary included, followed by a couple notes ... and dessert!

Risotto with Chicken and Artichokes
Ingredients:

4 teaspoons olive oil

1 (9 oz.) package frozen artichoke hearts

2 boneless skinless chicken breasts

Salt and pepper

1 3/4 cups chicken broth

2 tablespoons butter

1/2 white onion, chopped fine

2/3 cup Arborio rice
1/2 cup white wine
1 ounce parmesan cheese

Directions:
Thaw artichoke hearts by microwaving them, covered, for about 3 minutes. Pat dry with paper towels.

Heat 2 tablespoons oilve oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. Add artichoke hearts and cook until lightly browned, about 4 or 5 minutes. Transfer to a small bowl and set aside.

Pat the chicken breasts dry with a paper towel and season with salt and pepper on both sides. Heat the remaining olive oil in the skillet and carefully add the chicken. Cook until well-browned on one side, about 6 to 8 minutes. Flip the chicken over, and add the broth and water. Bring to a simmer, reduce the heat to medium-low, and cover. Cook about 6 to 8 minutes, until the chicken is done. (This is a partial poaching method I'd never tried before, but I liked it. The chicken ends up still having crispy bits because it was browned prior to finishing it off with a poach ... yum!)

Remove the chicken to a cutting board. When cool enough to handle, shred into bite-sized pieces (the easiest way to do this is to pull it apart with two forks). Transfer the cooking broth to a saucepan, bring to a simmer, then turn off the heat and cover. This will be your cooking liquid for the risotto.

Melt 1 tablespoon butter in the skillet over medium heat. Add the onion and a little salt. Cook until onion is soft and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the rice and cook, stirring often, until the kernels are transparent around the edges, about 2 minutes. Add the wine and cook until it has been completely absorbed, about 2 minutes.

Stir in one cup of the reserved broth and continue to simmer, stirring often, until the liquid is absorbed and the bottom of the pan is almost dry, about 7 to 9 minutes. Stir in a half cup more broth at a time, every few minutes, to keep the pan from drying out. Cook until rice is al dente, about 10 to 12 minutes. (If you don't set timers - and I didn't - you'll lose track of time. Just taste it and when it's a consistency you like, it's ready.)

Off the heat, quickly stir in the remaining butter and parmesan. Gently fold in the arichokes and chicken. Heat to a simmer, cover, and cook until heated through, about 5 minutes. Serve and enjoy!


Now, there are a couple things about this recipe that gave me pause: first, 2/3 cup rice didn't seem like much, and second, the recipe said you should add additional broth to the liquid used to poach the chicken breasts, but then noted that you might not need to use all of the liquid. It turns out that risotto expands so much that 2/3 cup was perfect for two servings. However, that extra broth wasn't necessary. My risotto turned out to be the perfect consistency, and I had plenty of cooking liquid leftover that wasn't used.

I'm sure where most people go wrong with risotto is in making it too quickly, or not getting the proportions quite right. It was well worth it to take my time, add just a little liquid at a time, and just watch it very carefully.

So, I promised you dessert! Espresso creme brulee sounded like a nice way to cap off this meal. I chose it because I discovered a creme brulee torch in the back of one of my kitchen cabinets the other day. I'm not a huge creme brulee fan because I can think of so many other more delicious things to eat for dessert, but I figured I should try out that torch.

Espresso Creme Brulee
Ingredients:
1 cup heavy cream
3 tablespoons sugar
Pinch salt
3 large egg yolks
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon instant espresso granules
1 tablespoon sugar (supposedly turbinado sugar, but granulated can be substituted)

Directions:
Adjust oven rack to the middle position and heat the oven to 300 degrees. Bring a full kettle of water to a boil. Place a kitchen towel in the bottom of a metal baking pan. (It has to be metal because you'll pour the boiling water into it - a glass pan may crack.) Set two 6-ounce ramekins on the towel. (BTW, I never discovered the reason for the towel ... but America's Test Kitchen knows what they're talking about, so do it anyway.)

Combine half a cup of the cream, sugar and salt in a saucepan. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Stir in the remaining half cup cream.

Place the egg yolks in a medium bowl with vanilla and espresso granules. Slowly whisk in half of the cream mixture. (You have to add the cream to the eggs and not the other way around because adding the eggs to the hot pan will most likely end up in scrambled eggs - not so good in creme brulee. And this slowly adding the cream to the eggs is something the pros call tempering, but I'm sure you've seen it on the Food Network, so I won't waste my time.) Add the remaining cream and whisk until thoroughly combined. Pour the mixture through a mesh strainer (this is more necessary if you used a real vanilla bean with seeds rather than vanilla extract, but I did catch a couple loose espresso granules and I swear it made a difference in the consistency of the custards when thye set). Pour the custard into the ramekins.

Transfer the baking pan to the oven and carefully pour enough boiling water into the pan to reach half way up the sides of the ramekins. Bake about 30 minutes, until the centers of the custards are just barely set. Remove from oven, remove ramekins from pan, and allow to cool to room temperature, about 1 hour. Then cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least two hours or overnight.

When ready to serve, remove ramekins from refrigerator, remove plastic and carefully blot the tops of the custards with a paper towel. Sprinkle evenly with a thin layer of sugar.

Now here's the part that's supposed to be fun because you're going to light them up with a torch ... but it turns out my torch didn't come with any butane gas, rendering it useless. Stupidly, we tried to use a lighter, but that just resulted in a blackened corner on one of the custards. So we just ate them as is and oh ... my ... god. They were samazing, even without the brulee! Rich and creamy and espresso-y. Yum! Yum! Yum!

Seriously, hands down, the best creme brulee I've ever had. I'll tell you what I told Vito and Lola .. "I'm not bragging, I'm just telling the truth." They believed me, so you should, too.