sf wrote:
On Wed, 4 Aug 2010 19:52:34 -0400, "Cheryl"
wrote:
"sf" wrote in message
...
I'm not trying to save money and I guess time improves with practice,
but I'm not looking at that (although the cost of "fresh" isn't
cheap)... I just want to make ravioli.
I made ravioli one time and it was a huge time waster and didn't turn out
any better than what you can get in the refrigerator section. The only good
thing is that you can control what's stuffed. So do pasta makers do
ravioli? I rolled mine out by hand but then again, it was in the '80s.
What I'd like to do this time is cut out circles, fill it, fold the
circle in half and seal.
A word of warning - Pasta that you intend to fold or layer and seal is a
*lot* more tricky to make than regular slice and dice pasta. The exact
moisture content and texture become critical, it needs to be soft and
moist enough to seal together, which is generally softer than you want
when you're going to run the pasta through the cutter rollers.
There are a bunch of ways to do ravioli and a bunch of gadgets for it,
but all the methods are a fair amount of work, so make the filling worth
it.
There are ravioli mold trays that look a bit like ice cube trays. You
put a sheet of past over them, push it down into the molds, fill each
cavity, put another sheet of pasta on top, and then run a rolling pin
across the top which crimps and perforates the ravioli on the top
pattern of the tray.
There are ravioli stamps that work a bit like the trays, only you put a
sheet of pasta down, put drops of filling, another sheet of pasta on
top, and then stamp around each drop with the stamp.
There is a ravioli attachment that goes on the pasta roller machine like
the cutter rolls. This machine takes two strips of pasta in from two
sides and you drop the filling in the middle. As you crank, it pulls the
pasta and filling through crimping and cutting with a rotary mold.
You can also do the cut and hand fold method, if you do that and don't
want the half moon empanada / turnover style, try cutting 2:1 rectangles
with a pizza cutter and then fold those in half around the filling. The
square / rectangle method also means less gathering and re-rolling of
pasta scraps.