Home Made Ravioli

Pasta:

Place ⅓ of a five pound bag of unbleached flour in a big shallow mixing bowl. With your fingers form a hole in the middle of the bowl of flour, with some flour remaining at the bottom of the hole. Crack the 12 eggs into the hole in middle of flour and mix the eggs with a fork in the middle hole. Then use your hands to gently mix eggs with the flour and after that use both hands to gently roll mixture into a big ball.

Place the dough ball on a pastry board or granite counter top and press it slightly down onto surface. the mix should be very thick and hard--add just a little bit (roughly ⅛ cup) of water just enough to get the flour so it doesn’t look white and powdery. it should still be very firm. Then gently roll the dough with a nonstick rolling pin just a tiny bit until dough is slightly flattened. At this point you should leave it for about 2 hours at room temperature, just returning every once in a while to knead it a little and press it down again. While it’s sitting there it should be covered with the bowl you were working with turned upside down. after about 2 hours it gets smooth and darkens to a gold color on the outside. It is then ready to be worked on.

Filling:

Mix in mixing bowl: 2 eggs, 3 pounds whole milk ricotta, ⅛ tsp salt, ⅛ tsp white pepper, 1 tsp parsley, and 2 tbsps grated fresh romano cheese.

To Fill Ravioli:

After dough has been sitting for roughly 2 hours and looks smooth and golden on outside, separate dough into 2 balls. Roll each ball with nonstick rolling pin, flouring very lightly, until each ball of dough is about 1 inch thick and is about 1½ hands in diameter. This dough is the same dough which you can use to make fettucini or spaghetti as well as ravioli.

For ravioli, feed the 1 inch thick dough in pieces of equal size into your mechanical, metal PASTA DOUGH ROLLER, set at medium notch and at flat, making sure that there are no holes or weak spots in the dough as it comes out of the roller, (so that the ricotta filling does not seep out when baked). roll each piece through the roller 3 times, always at flat and at medium notch. Then position your dough strips under and over in your metal, mechanical ravioli maker with the filling in the middle, about ½ tsp filling for each ravioli. press ravioli maker to form ravioli and then remove and separate raviolis and place them on a tray over corm meal sprinkled on top of tray.

To freeze ravioli, put your tray of raviolis on cornmeal into the freezer and let the raviolis harden; then when hard, remove them from tray and put them into a bag or a plastic container in freezer.

For spaghetti and fettucini, roll your pasta dough twice in roller on flat and at medium notch setting. Then for your third roll, use the spaghetti or fettucini setting, still on medium notch.