Making ravioli Archives - Proud Italian Cook

A few days ago my cousin, sister-in-law and I spent the day together making ravioli for an annual party that we’re having. This is a family recipe that my mother and aunt use to make. I have vivid memories of clean white sheets on dining room tables and beds filled with ravioli when I was young, and although I do things a little bit different then they did, I follow their recipe exactly, which I still have on a very yellowed index card.

They kept it simple, they would always make two kinds, a meat and a cheese version. The meat ravioli were filled with ground round or sirloin, romano cheese, spinach and a little onion. The cheese version was always made with ricotta cheese, eggs, romano cheese and fresh parsley.
I like to make all my fillings the night before as it takes time to mix everything together, tasting and getting the flavors just right. After the meat cools down I like to pulse it in a food processor so it’s more uniform and not lumpy. I also like to put my fillings into disposable pastry bags, it goes much faster than a spoon when you’re filling the forms.
I know you can use many different flours but Ceresota unbleached flour was always their flour of choice, so that’s what I use!

The morning we were making them I got up early, took my eggs out of the fridge (so they could get to room temperature) set up the pasta machine and everything else we would be using. Before they came I made 10 batches of dough, it’s very important to let the dough rest before you start rolling it.
I make all my dough using my food processor, I could never do the well method, for one thing I don’t have the patience, and I know I would have eggs dripping all down my counters, besides using the food processor is so quick and it always comes out perfect!

Ceresota flour, eggs, a tiny bit of salt, olive oil and a little bit of water creates the perfect dough for me, I didn’t have one problem with it all day!

We were in the zone, drinking coffee, listening to Christmas music, each one of us doing our specific jobs.

Squirting the cheese mixture into the the ravioli forms is super speedy with a pastry bag!

We were cranking them out left and right!

Aren’t they cute?

Because they will be cooked this weekend I froze all of them, which is very easy to do.

I lay them single layer on a baking sheet, stick the whole tray in the freezer, the meat ones take about a half hour to freeze and the cheese about 1 hour.
When frozen I take them off the tray and place them into zip lock freezer bags.

We ended up with 400! It took us only 4 hours, so that’s about 100 an hour, not too bad, although it took me 2 hours to clean my kitchen, flour was everywhere, but it was worth it because there’s nothing like homemade rav’s!

We had to taste test them to make sure everything was just right, so I heated up some marinara and boiled up a few, even in their frozen state they only take about 6 minutes to cook.