Weekendage
The big accomplishment of note for this weekend was my first homemade ravioli.
We'll look at the bright side and say it was a valiant first attempt.
But, actually, to roll back somewhat--Friday night, I got a hankering to make fresh pasta for dinner that night. How quickly could I really pull it together? Given my initial difficulties hand making the dough, I decided to try the food processor method this time and, IMO, it worked so much better (deliberately choosing larger eggs may have contributed). I only added a tiny bit of water and decided afterwards that maybe I hadn't even needed that.
I split the dough up into the sixths recommended by Bittman's cookbook and, this time, rolled five of the sixths up into plastic wrap and stuck them in the fridge. The first sixth I rolled out to super thin fettucine as an experiment (which, FWIW, was interesting but not advisable to repeat) and had those for dinner with a little butter, parm, salt, and pepper.
It took me about 25 minutes from start to pasta. Not bad.
----
Saturday, I used another sixth to make thicker (but IMO, not thick enough) fettucine to go into homemade chicken noodle soup from the stock made on Thursday. I still have enough leftover for another bowl or two.
----
Then, yesterday, was the ravioli experiment.
I'd intended to take a crack at making roasted garlic-cashew cheese ravioli (as both ebonlock and I are lactose intolerant), but then I sat down yesterday afternoon to read the cashew cheese recipe and it said "let the cashews soak for 12 hours" and I went ahahahaha no, Plan B.
Instead, I hit the megamart and bought some gruyere and mixed probably the equivalent of a head of roasted garlic in with 4 oz. of vegan (non-dairy) cream cheese, 4 oz. of grated gruyere, a little bit of sea salt and a few grinds of white pepper.
The raviolis themselves were...well, even only rolled out to the thickest pasta setting the recipe recommended, the dough still felt very flimsy. I wasn't quite sure how to make sure the sticky filling was going into the ravioli so I stuffed it a little (which did seem to work), but there was dough separation issues with the finished raviolis--it came out in perforated sheets which didn't want to tear apart cleanly (this may have been a factor of the dough being too wet--see original water observations).
So, I fell back to less mechanized methods--I cut the sheet apart with a knife.
A few of them, unsurprisingly, burst when cooked, but otherwise? They were pretty tasty for a filling that I dreamed up to go with the pumpkin sauce from last week and enough of them were contiguous that I'm encouraged to keep at it until I can either get the knack of the machine add-on or give up entirely and go for a more traditional assembly that I'm more familiar with from the billions of cooking shows I've watched.
We'll look at the bright side and say it was a valiant first attempt.
But, actually, to roll back somewhat--Friday night, I got a hankering to make fresh pasta for dinner that night. How quickly could I really pull it together? Given my initial difficulties hand making the dough, I decided to try the food processor method this time and, IMO, it worked so much better (deliberately choosing larger eggs may have contributed). I only added a tiny bit of water and decided afterwards that maybe I hadn't even needed that.
I split the dough up into the sixths recommended by Bittman's cookbook and, this time, rolled five of the sixths up into plastic wrap and stuck them in the fridge. The first sixth I rolled out to super thin fettucine as an experiment (which, FWIW, was interesting but not advisable to repeat) and had those for dinner with a little butter, parm, salt, and pepper.
It took me about 25 minutes from start to pasta. Not bad.
----
Saturday, I used another sixth to make thicker (but IMO, not thick enough) fettucine to go into homemade chicken noodle soup from the stock made on Thursday. I still have enough leftover for another bowl or two.
----
Then, yesterday, was the ravioli experiment.
I'd intended to take a crack at making roasted garlic-cashew cheese ravioli (as both ebonlock and I are lactose intolerant), but then I sat down yesterday afternoon to read the cashew cheese recipe and it said "let the cashews soak for 12 hours" and I went ahahahaha no, Plan B.
Instead, I hit the megamart and bought some gruyere and mixed probably the equivalent of a head of roasted garlic in with 4 oz. of vegan (non-dairy) cream cheese, 4 oz. of grated gruyere, a little bit of sea salt and a few grinds of white pepper.
The raviolis themselves were...well, even only rolled out to the thickest pasta setting the recipe recommended, the dough still felt very flimsy. I wasn't quite sure how to make sure the sticky filling was going into the ravioli so I stuffed it a little (which did seem to work), but there was dough separation issues with the finished raviolis--it came out in perforated sheets which didn't want to tear apart cleanly (this may have been a factor of the dough being too wet--see original water observations).
So, I fell back to less mechanized methods--I cut the sheet apart with a knife.
A few of them, unsurprisingly, burst when cooked, but otherwise? They were pretty tasty for a filling that I dreamed up to go with the pumpkin sauce from last week and enough of them were contiguous that I'm encouraged to keep at it until I can either get the knack of the machine add-on or give up entirely and go for a more traditional assembly that I'm more familiar with from the billions of cooking shows I've watched.