Pasta adventures

Last week, I made pasta for the first time. I had acquired a ravioli mould from a vintage market in Bristol the weekend before, so set out to make ravioli. 

I had also received the book 'Italian Food' by Elizabeth David as a present earlier this year, so I found a recipe in there to get started with. First published in 1954, David was the first chef to really bring Italian food and cooking to the British public. I also really like the look of The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - it has pictures for a start - but I already have several cookbooks that aren't as well thumbed as I'd like. 

I decided to use the cheese mixture from David's ravioli caprese recipe - essentially lots of parmesan and gruyere (in absence of some caprese goats cheese or something) with some eggs and seasoning (nutmeg, marjoram, salt and pepper). In this recipe, it mentions that some believe basil to be a foreign interpretation of Italian spices, and that you should only use marjoram. David doesn't make a firm stand on this but I decided to use just marjoram, partly because I had never used it before! She suggested using a different pasta recipe for this ravioli but I decided to use the standard one (taken from her tagliatelle recipe) - apparently it's harder.

David suggested using unbleached all purpose flour, I bought the special pasta flour '00' (Italians grade their flour differently to us, '00' means the whitest flour). 

I'm generally not keen on rolling out pastry so did struggle rolling out the pasta flour. And post-cooking, we thought perhaps we hadn't rolled it thin enough as it was a bit more al dente than anticipated. 

Our first batch was perhaps a little too full of cheese mixture so it was harder to seal the parcels, but most turned out pretty well and the cheese mixture was very yummy when all melted.

Flour is just about big enough for mould

Adding the cheese mixture

Waiting to be cooked