Guest Post: Sofia's Family Ravioli Recipe

This week we have a great guest poster!  Sofia, an old friend of mine (and extremely talented photographer) recently posted the above photo on her Facebook page. Since Ravioli is something I have always wanted to try making (and because it looks so delicious!) I knew immediately that I would have to ask her to post the recipe for you all.  Thankfully she agreed, so here it is: 

Hi guys! 

So Jacqueline, the very talented cook has asked me to write about my family's homemade ravioli recipe.  Please forgive me as I don't write recipes for a living but here is my best attempt at it!  Good luck! 

Ingredients
- 1 cup semolina flour
- 1 cup O type flour
- 2 eggs
- 2 dashes of salt
- 1 tsp olive oil (the good stuff)


Directions

Mix flours together in a bowl.  place half the mixture in a pile on a cutting board on your counter.  Make a well in the middle of the pile of flour and crack one egg into the well.  Add a dash of salt to the egg as well as half a tsp of olive oil.  Stir this mixture in the middle of the well with a fork slowly incorporating more and more flour.  You want to almost neat the eggs in the middle of the flour mixture before you start adding more flour from the edges.  Keep doing this till you have a nice consistency with the dough.  Repeat with the rest of the flour mixture and the other egg. 

Next you want to knead your dough for about 15 minutes. Great pasta requires love.

Rest dough which has been perfectly kneaded into a ball in the fridge. The dough needs to rest before you stretch it.

Our family uses a pasta machine to then stretch the dough out and then make raviolis. You can find a great pasta machine at any local Italian market. There is a great one near downtown Edmonton if you live near there. If you don’t have one then a rolling pin will do. You will have to keep an eye on the dough to have an even thickness at every end.

Stuffing the raviolis is quite easy. You line up little balls of your mixture and brush an egg yolk wash around the edges so that when you put a layer of dough on top it will stick together. Make sure your pockets of ravioli have NO openings because if you do, you’ll end up with fillings in your boiling water instead of in your raviolis.

Boil the raviolis. Toss in your favorite tomato or cheese sauce, in our family we roast our own tomato sauce which is SO worth it to do. We will leave that recipe for maybe another guest post! ;)

My family tips:

*The type of flour you use will help. Semolina is coarse so mixing it with a finer one makes a great combination. The type O or OO flour is great for pasta and pizza dough, this is our favorite flour to use with the semolina.

*Always mix the salt with the flour, if you mix it into the flour mixture you will not get even distribution. No one likes just one piece of super salty pasta… if you get my drift…

*Fillings – Ravioli is a GREAT way to get rid of left overs. We change up our fillings almost every time we make this. If we have leftover sautéed mushrooms from dinner last night, then mushrooms and some mascarpone and parmesan will be the filling the next night. We’ve done everything from left over crab to roasted acorn squash (Try that one with pine nuts… holy good)

*Always do equal parts flour to eggs for this recipe.

Enjoy!

Sofia Larocque.