ladysprite (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ladysprite) wrote2010-12-27 09:31 pm
ladysprite) wrote2010-12-27 09:31 pm
Entry tags:
Ravioli-uh-oh
In case you haven't figured this out yet, I love to cook. And I love to experiment with new recipes, and learn new techniques. And one of the things I have never done, but have wanted to for a long time, is learn how to make my own pasta from scratch.
So this year I was given a pasta maker as a holiday gift. I know, I don't technically need a pasta maker in order to make pasta, but it's a kitchen gizmo, and that makes me happy - and besides, our counters are all just high enough that rolling things out on them is a challenge for me, and wrestling with pasta dough by hand would be a royal pain, literally and figuratively.
I was looking forward to playing with my new toy, and since today was both our first day back home and a lazy, snowed-in sort of day, I decided to make a project out of it.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
umbran read through the manual and set up the machine on our back counter, and I pulled out a handful of cookbooks and browsed through them until I found a recipe that sounded both suitably simple and fun - ravioli with prosciutto, basil, sun-dried tomatoes, and mozzarella. After a quick trip to Whole Foods (made easier by our Awesome Snowblowing Neighbor, who was gratefully repaid with cookies), I was ready to start.
Making the dough was, in fact, as easy as I thought it would be. The food processor blended everything together in about a minute, and I kneaded it by hand a few times until it felt right - the recipe said it should be silky, smooth, and elastic, and it was. I stuck it in the refrigerator for an hour, puttered around for a bit, and made the filling, but mostly I was waiting impatiently to try out the shiny machine clamped to the counter.
Finally, the dough had chilled and I was ready to go. I separated it out into four equal balls, smushed one a little with my hands, and started rolling it through the roller at its widest setting. The pasta machine wobbled a little on the counter, but I braced it with one hand and started cranking with the other.
The handle promptly fell out of the machine.
Undaunted, I picked it up, fitted it back in, and started rolling again. Slowly, steadily, and surely, I fed the sheet of pasta through progressively narrower settings on the machine, until ultimately had a sheet of pasta that was about 2-3mm thick and at least 3 feet long. I bounced a little and crowed to my husband, who was helping out in the other half of the kitchen by prepping little filling bundles. This was easy!
I picked up the second dough ball, smushed it out, and started passing it through the pasta machine. The handle fell out again. This was no problem, though; I put it back. I was a pasta-making master, after all. I pushed a little, braced the machine with my other hand, and started turning the handle again.
The cylinders that rolled the pasta refused to turn.
I took the handle out, and put it back in again. No change. I frowned, and poked at the dough ball, and tried again. No change. Convinced this was a machine problem, and therefore a Man Chore, I hollered my husband over. He hmm'ed, and poked, and took the handle out and put it back in. No change. We ran it backwards, and it worked fine; forwards... nothing. Eventually I smooshed the dough out even flatter, and slowly, agonizingly, managed to crank it through, only losing the handle twice more in the process.
And then I reset the pasta maker to the next narrower setting, preparing for the progressive flattening and stretching. I started feeding the dough sheet in, only to have it catch in the space between the cylinder and the side of the machine, tearing into tiny shreds.
I took a deep breath, picked up the handle from where it fell when I tried to readjust the dough, and poked and prodded until I pulled out all the dough from the crevices, then squoze it all back into a ball, reset the machine to its widest setting, and started again.
This time I made it through three of the seven settings before disaster struck, and the dough managed to stick to the cylinder, wrapping itself completely around and then feeding out upside down and backwards. I cursed a few times as I ran the machine backwards, pulled out at least half of the dough, and then spent another fifteen minutes trying to get up inside a machine that looks eerily like a miniature mangler and doesn't come apart. Finally I got the last few bits of dough out, smushed them back into the rest of the dough ball.... and promptly dropped it all, only to have it roll under the counter into a shadowy nest of crumbs and goodness knows what else.
I shouted some inappropriate words at that point, and stomped my feet, and I'm pretty sure I slammed the crumby ball of mangled dough into the trash with more force than strictly was necessary. But I am nothing if not stubborn, and I was darned if I would let this spoil my enjoyment of my new gizmo. Plus, I had plenty more pasta dough.
I took the third ball, squashed it out, and started feeding it through. This time the cylinders all worked, but the edges shredded it into something that looked more like a scab than anything I ever want to put into my mouth ever should. Squash. Reform. Repeat. More shredding. Squash. Reform. Repeat. I started dusting the dough with more flour, in case it was just too sticky to roll. This time, holding my breath, rolling ever so slowly and carefully, coaxing out the newly-flattened sheet with my off hand and coaxing the machine with gentle praise and encouragement, I made it through five of the seven settings. Grinning happily, I started the next-to-last roll.
I got about four inches in before it wrapped around the cylinder, got stuck in the crevice, and stopped spinning all at once.
It took another ten minutes to coax the dough out, and by the time I did I realized that, with the multiple restarts, I now had a brick-like lump that was far too stiff to do anything with except bludgeon small animals. By that time, the pasta machine had been christened 'little bitch,' and I was talking to it in ways that, if it were my child, would have it taken into protective custody. I also realized that the first sheet I had rolled out was rapidly stiffening and drying into unusability.
I was *not* about to let a stupid goddamn machine ruin dinner. I stuck the last bit of dough into the fridge and, looking at the pictures in the book, started filling and shaping and cutting the ravioli.
Cookbooks, like surgical manuals, lie. No matter what any book tells you, there is nothing simple about shaping dough around filling by just cupping your hand and rocking it just-so. Though I will admit that I may have been somewhat hampered by a deep-set need to pound the living daylights out of *something* at that point. Either way, I managed to hammer out about half a dozen rather large and odd-looking ravioli.
Having taken a break and succeeded at one thing, I felt that I was ready to take on the machine again, with my last remaining bit of dough. I flattened and shaped it carefully. I made sure the machine was screwed tightly to the counter. I dusted the dough with semolina flour, and measured to make sure I was feeding it into the exact center of the rollers. I set the handle as firmly in the socket as possible.
It refused to roll. At this point, my ever-patient husband (who had gone online, realized that this particular machine did *not* have the best reviews, and had apologetically promised me a much better, prettier, nicer one) gently suggested that we maybe could just have leftovers for dinner. I shouted something incoherent at him, then took a deep breath and started, slowly, to coax the dough through.
Six of seven passes, this time, before it got caught on a sticky-outy bit, shredding one side while wrapping the other around the cylinder.
I would not be defeated, though. I pulled out my rolling pin and did my level best to salvage the dough, until I had something that, while not millimeters thin, was at least vaguely usable, and filled and shaped another handful of ravioli. Unfortunately, we still had about 20 more ravioli worth of (fairly expensive) prosciutto and mozzarella filling.
I went back to the previous dough, hoping that if I tried to soften it a little it might be workable. Little Bitch took one look at it and forcibly ejected her own handle in spite. In a fit of pique, frustration, and refusal to be defeated by scrap tin, I stomped over to the freezer, grabbed a package of frozen wonton wrappers, and waved them at the damn pasta machine, informing it that I was outsourcing its job to China.
Then I calmly asked my husband to set a pot of water to boil, and set out to make about 20 little prosciutto-and-mozzarella wontons.
Dinner was only about two hours later than expected, and while the wontons were a little odd, the few ravioli I managed to make were actually not bad. A little stiff from overworked dough, but otherwise good. It's a shame; it'd be much easier to give up on pasta-making altogether if they had been inedible....
Edited to add: Clearly I phrased this poorly - I know not to pick up the pasta and try to shape it by cupping it in my hands. The recipes I checked recommended pressing out the air from around the filling by pressing down on the filled pasta with a cupped hand and rocking/wrapping around the filling, before sealing the edges and cutting the ravioli. I apologize for being unclear in my wording.
So this year I was given a pasta maker as a holiday gift. I know, I don't technically need a pasta maker in order to make pasta, but it's a kitchen gizmo, and that makes me happy - and besides, our counters are all just high enough that rolling things out on them is a challenge for me, and wrestling with pasta dough by hand would be a royal pain, literally and figuratively.
I was looking forward to playing with my new toy, and since today was both our first day back home and a lazy, snowed-in sort of day, I decided to make a project out of it.
umbran read through the manual and set up the machine on our back counter, and I pulled out a handful of cookbooks and browsed through them until I found a recipe that sounded both suitably simple and fun - ravioli with prosciutto, basil, sun-dried tomatoes, and mozzarella. After a quick trip to Whole Foods (made easier by our Awesome Snowblowing Neighbor, who was gratefully repaid with cookies), I was ready to start.Making the dough was, in fact, as easy as I thought it would be. The food processor blended everything together in about a minute, and I kneaded it by hand a few times until it felt right - the recipe said it should be silky, smooth, and elastic, and it was. I stuck it in the refrigerator for an hour, puttered around for a bit, and made the filling, but mostly I was waiting impatiently to try out the shiny machine clamped to the counter.
Finally, the dough had chilled and I was ready to go. I separated it out into four equal balls, smushed one a little with my hands, and started rolling it through the roller at its widest setting. The pasta machine wobbled a little on the counter, but I braced it with one hand and started cranking with the other.
The handle promptly fell out of the machine.
Undaunted, I picked it up, fitted it back in, and started rolling again. Slowly, steadily, and surely, I fed the sheet of pasta through progressively narrower settings on the machine, until ultimately had a sheet of pasta that was about 2-3mm thick and at least 3 feet long. I bounced a little and crowed to my husband, who was helping out in the other half of the kitchen by prepping little filling bundles. This was easy!
I picked up the second dough ball, smushed it out, and started passing it through the pasta machine. The handle fell out again. This was no problem, though; I put it back. I was a pasta-making master, after all. I pushed a little, braced the machine with my other hand, and started turning the handle again.
The cylinders that rolled the pasta refused to turn.
I took the handle out, and put it back in again. No change. I frowned, and poked at the dough ball, and tried again. No change. Convinced this was a machine problem, and therefore a Man Chore, I hollered my husband over. He hmm'ed, and poked, and took the handle out and put it back in. No change. We ran it backwards, and it worked fine; forwards... nothing. Eventually I smooshed the dough out even flatter, and slowly, agonizingly, managed to crank it through, only losing the handle twice more in the process.
And then I reset the pasta maker to the next narrower setting, preparing for the progressive flattening and stretching. I started feeding the dough sheet in, only to have it catch in the space between the cylinder and the side of the machine, tearing into tiny shreds.
I took a deep breath, picked up the handle from where it fell when I tried to readjust the dough, and poked and prodded until I pulled out all the dough from the crevices, then squoze it all back into a ball, reset the machine to its widest setting, and started again.
This time I made it through three of the seven settings before disaster struck, and the dough managed to stick to the cylinder, wrapping itself completely around and then feeding out upside down and backwards. I cursed a few times as I ran the machine backwards, pulled out at least half of the dough, and then spent another fifteen minutes trying to get up inside a machine that looks eerily like a miniature mangler and doesn't come apart. Finally I got the last few bits of dough out, smushed them back into the rest of the dough ball.... and promptly dropped it all, only to have it roll under the counter into a shadowy nest of crumbs and goodness knows what else.
I shouted some inappropriate words at that point, and stomped my feet, and I'm pretty sure I slammed the crumby ball of mangled dough into the trash with more force than strictly was necessary. But I am nothing if not stubborn, and I was darned if I would let this spoil my enjoyment of my new gizmo. Plus, I had plenty more pasta dough.
I took the third ball, squashed it out, and started feeding it through. This time the cylinders all worked, but the edges shredded it into something that looked more like a scab than anything I ever want to put into my mouth ever should. Squash. Reform. Repeat. More shredding. Squash. Reform. Repeat. I started dusting the dough with more flour, in case it was just too sticky to roll. This time, holding my breath, rolling ever so slowly and carefully, coaxing out the newly-flattened sheet with my off hand and coaxing the machine with gentle praise and encouragement, I made it through five of the seven settings. Grinning happily, I started the next-to-last roll.
I got about four inches in before it wrapped around the cylinder, got stuck in the crevice, and stopped spinning all at once.
It took another ten minutes to coax the dough out, and by the time I did I realized that, with the multiple restarts, I now had a brick-like lump that was far too stiff to do anything with except bludgeon small animals. By that time, the pasta machine had been christened 'little bitch,' and I was talking to it in ways that, if it were my child, would have it taken into protective custody. I also realized that the first sheet I had rolled out was rapidly stiffening and drying into unusability.
I was *not* about to let a stupid goddamn machine ruin dinner. I stuck the last bit of dough into the fridge and, looking at the pictures in the book, started filling and shaping and cutting the ravioli.
Cookbooks, like surgical manuals, lie. No matter what any book tells you, there is nothing simple about shaping dough around filling by just cupping your hand and rocking it just-so. Though I will admit that I may have been somewhat hampered by a deep-set need to pound the living daylights out of *something* at that point. Either way, I managed to hammer out about half a dozen rather large and odd-looking ravioli.
Having taken a break and succeeded at one thing, I felt that I was ready to take on the machine again, with my last remaining bit of dough. I flattened and shaped it carefully. I made sure the machine was screwed tightly to the counter. I dusted the dough with semolina flour, and measured to make sure I was feeding it into the exact center of the rollers. I set the handle as firmly in the socket as possible.
It refused to roll. At this point, my ever-patient husband (who had gone online, realized that this particular machine did *not* have the best reviews, and had apologetically promised me a much better, prettier, nicer one) gently suggested that we maybe could just have leftovers for dinner. I shouted something incoherent at him, then took a deep breath and started, slowly, to coax the dough through.
Six of seven passes, this time, before it got caught on a sticky-outy bit, shredding one side while wrapping the other around the cylinder.
I would not be defeated, though. I pulled out my rolling pin and did my level best to salvage the dough, until I had something that, while not millimeters thin, was at least vaguely usable, and filled and shaped another handful of ravioli. Unfortunately, we still had about 20 more ravioli worth of (fairly expensive) prosciutto and mozzarella filling.
I went back to the previous dough, hoping that if I tried to soften it a little it might be workable. Little Bitch took one look at it and forcibly ejected her own handle in spite. In a fit of pique, frustration, and refusal to be defeated by scrap tin, I stomped over to the freezer, grabbed a package of frozen wonton wrappers, and waved them at the damn pasta machine, informing it that I was outsourcing its job to China.
Then I calmly asked my husband to set a pot of water to boil, and set out to make about 20 little prosciutto-and-mozzarella wontons.
Dinner was only about two hours later than expected, and while the wontons were a little odd, the few ravioli I managed to make were actually not bad. A little stiff from overworked dough, but otherwise good. It's a shame; it'd be much easier to give up on pasta-making altogether if they had been inedible....
Edited to add: Clearly I phrased this poorly - I know not to pick up the pasta and try to shape it by cupping it in my hands. The recipes I checked recommended pressing out the air from around the filling by pressing down on the filled pasta with a cupped hand and rocking/wrapping around the filling, before sealing the edges and cutting the ravioli. I apologize for being unclear in my wording.
no subject
Also, I have never seen any cook on the Food Network make ravioli by cupping them in their hands; they always seem to press the dough down around the filling and then cut the ravioli apart with a knife or pizza cutter.
no subject
Sorry for the confusion!
no subject
The simplest pasta to make if you want to practice rolling techniques is: one egg, one egg of water, and one to two cups of flour, depending on humidity level.
And janetmiles is correct about the ravioli technique. Also, be duly warned. Ravioli and other stuffed, sealed pasta can be very tricky. It can be very stubborn, and hard to seal. If this happens, dip your finger in water or (ew) egg white, and run it around *one* side of the pasta, which will help it grab onto the other side. Don't dampen both sides, or you get wet non-sticking pasta instead of dry non-sticking pasta.
I'd be happy to help or give advice or just listen to ranting. I grew up with home made pasta.
no subject
As for technique, as I explained to Janet, I *was* pressing against the counter - what I meant was that I was cupping my hand around the filling as I pressed down on the counter. I'm not an idiot, I know not to pick it up and cup it. Sealing it was the easy part; I have a lot of experience making filled cookies and pastries, so the seal was no problem - all of the ones I managed to make stayed sealed with no trouble.
Thank you for all your advice!
no subject
So, yeah. The big thing is practice. And seriously -- get the husband to catch when you're rolling -- makes it *way* less likely to stick to the rollers, as he can pull it out for you before it gets crazy. Never Pasta Alone! Always Pasta With a Buddy! :)
no subject
I have a ravioli tray that allows me to put my dough on the tray, fill it, and cover it with another sheet and roll my way to filled ravioli packages. It works pretty well as long as I don't stuff them too full.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
We have a machine, but it rarely gets an outing. It has a (square) ravioli attachment.
Another alternative that avoids shaping uses pasta sheets - either do "open ravioli" - very restaurant - or use a revioli tray, into which you lay one sheet and the filling, then roll another over the top.
no subject
(I am Italian-American, and even I find some things are far nicer with less work. I'm really pretty good with pasta, but I hates the ravioli, my precious, hatesssssss it!)
no subject
http://www.lakeland.co.uk/ravioli-press/F/C/cooking-baking/C/cooking-baking-pasta-making/product/12104 (http://www.lakeland.co.uk/ravioli-press/F/C/cooking-baking/C/cooking-baking-pasta-making/product/12104)
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
There is no hope - no hope at all - unless you cast a proper summoning of the duck to undo the horror of the goose-hex (no relation to Jonah Hex, mind you).
The only problem is that in order to do the proper summoning of the duck - improper duck summonings involve well-dressed drakes, and do you know how hard it is to keep them from buying a suit that sets them back more than a bill? - where was I?
Oh, yeah, proper summoning of the duck requires that you collect the elements most fowl, but only during wabbit season. (Not during *rabbit* season, and most especially not during duck season. I've found that a collection of Loony Tunes on stutter-repeat are most helpful here.)
Oh, yeah. And wine. Lots of good Italian wine. Just be careful about fending off the Italians or you'll end up with a duck making an offer you can't refuse.
On the other hand, if you don't refuse the offer, you'll probably get the goose-hex taken off, and you'll have better luck with your next batch.
no subject
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkXy12xVnRs
(it's funny, and no one gets hurt)
no subject
no subject
Why yes, I've done both of the above to unusually stubborn implements, why do you ask? (grin)
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Did you use semolina flour for your entire recipe? If you did, that could have been part of your problem.
Semolina is a very hard flour and makes a very stiff dough. It's generally only used for pasta that's going to be dried, as it's rather tough if used in fresh pasta. I suspect (I've never used it, but feel pretty confident in this) that it's also harder to flatten than an all-purpose flour pasta, especially if you chilled the dough (rather than let it rest at room temperature).
Before tossing the machine out entirely, you might want to give it a run using an AP-flour based dough. I don't have my super-simple recipe handy, but I'll be sure to hunt it down over the next few days and share it with you!
no subject
That said, I'd love to see your recipe, if you don't mind sharing!
no subject