Ravioli Recipe Photos with commentary

Anthony's Ravioli Recipe Photos with Commentary
(Step by step photos of the cooking process for this recipe with commentary!)

Read the complete Ravioli recipe

I have placed some explanatory photos below that, hopefully, will help you along in your Italian culinary adventure. Sometimes a picture and a few tips really helps!... ;-) These are the details I feel are always missing in your average recipe book or recipe website.

Making Homemade Raviolis. Step by step photos Part 1
Starting to make the homemade pasta.

This is a photo of my mother in-law Rose's pasta machine, she's had this forever and passed it on to my wife. It's a wonderful machine that helps you make Ravioli noodles as well as Lasagna, Fettucini, Spaghetti and more :-) Lovely machine!

Here is a nice side view of the machine attached to my kitchen table. Redo for the dough! You can see three slots on top. The left helps you make large flat noodles, middle is for Fettucini and far right is for Spaghetti. Great machine, you need one. Can find this particular machine anywhere but there is a nice one here.

Here we have all the goodies you need to make a nice home-made pasta that you could use for several different types of pasta. In this case, we are going to make Raviolis.

This is a photo of everything you need to make the Raviolis: pasta and the filling.

You will need a nice "clean" counter to work with. The proper way to make home-made pasta is right on the counter.

When you scoop up the flour, be sure not to pack it. Keep it nice and fluffy..

The use the back of a butter knife to scrape off the excess. This will help to get a perfect measure for the cup.

Pour the flour right onto the counter.

After you have poured out all the flour, you then will need to make a well. Think of it as a nice little nest for the eggs :-).

Then drop some eggs in a bowl...

...and lightly beat them....

...then pour them into the well you made in the flour..

After you have poured in the eggs you will want to slowly push flour up on top of the eggs.

Keep add more flour on top of the eggs while pushing flour into the eggs. It's going to get messy from this point on out but that's OK. Just get messy!.

Now you will want to start working with the flour and egg trying to mix it together well.. The goal is to have a nice elastic ball of pasta dough when you're done. At this point, you still have a very long way to go. Be patient.

At this point some of the egg/flour mix will stick to the counter. Just scrape it off the counter as best you can to keep mixing together..

Keep working with it. This is going to take a while, be patient and just keep working with it.

..add in your salt and keep working with the dough.

Making Homemade Raviolis. Step by step photos Part 2
Finish making the pasta and start making the Ravioli filling.

Now you will add some Olive Oil. A very important ingredient!

Now keep on working with the dough. It will be very crumbly at this point and you will say to yourself.. Man! Something is wrong with this dough, there is no way it's going to be a nice elastic ball. Patience.. Just keep working with it.

...Now add some water, this will make the dough wet, slimy and sticky all at the same time, don't worry about it, just keep working with the dough.

At this point you will start to kneed the dough using some muscle. The dough will start to get more firm. Keep working it! You might want to put on some disco music at this point or something lively to keep you going!!! ;-)

Work the dough some more. If the dough is still crumbly and it's not all sticking together smoothly you will need to add some more water.

Add very little at a time, you don't want too much water, some times you just need drops more.

Now it's time to really work hard. This is where you will do some classic dough kneading using the palm of your hand and your other hand on top of that hand giving you more strength as you push the dough down.

Fold it over and push again. If you don't break a small sweat you are not working hard enough. You will be kneading this dough for about 15 - 20 minutes or so.

This photo was taken after about 20 minutes of kneading. Hard work! This is the most important part to good tasting home-made pasta! You want to keep working with the pasta dough until you have a ball that is very smooth with few cracks.

Well, here is a nice pasta dough ball ready to turn into some wonderful Ravioli!! YUM!!!! You can take a rest at this point and prepare your work area to start using the pasta machine for your Ravioli creation of YUM!

You see here, I am very happy at this point because the dough came out just perfect! This is a perfect pasta dough ball! PERFECT! :-) With this ball of pasta dough I can make, Ravioli noodles as well as Lasagna, Fettucini, Spaghetti and even little puppy dogs if I want :-)

Here you see I have prepared my work area to start working with the pasta. I have clamped my pasta machine onto the table where I can easily work with it. I have set down a nice clean cotton table cloth and there sits the pasta ball of joy ready to go!

This is cool. These are the Italian instructions that came with the pasta machine. This is a very old machine and I am so grateful my mother in-law passed it on to my wife.

You can see here that when you have finished preparing your dough ball you should have about 1-1/2" lbs. of pasta dough ready to go. I recommend you have one of these scales in your kitchen. They are very cheap and you can get them at Wal-Mart or any store like it.

Here is the the Ricotta cheese being weighed to be sure I have the proper amount. I also have a nice large bowl to work with as well as the Parmesan cheese and fresh chopped parsley ready to go. You will being using Basil as well.

In my opinion POLLY-O Ricotta Cheese is the best you can get and is the only thing I will use for my Raviolis and Lasagna, for that matter.

Into the bowl goes the lovely Ricotta cheese.

Then the fresh parsley and Parmesan cheese. This is really some yummy filling!
Important note: Not shown in the photos is the (1) Egg that I added to this mix. Picture in your mind the egg falling into this bowl ;-)

Making Homemade Raviolis. Step by step photos Part 3
Finish making the Ravioli filling and start making the Raviolis.

Now you need to finish mixing up your filling of Ricotta Cheese, Parmesan Cheese, Basil and coarse ground black Pepper.

OK, now you see here everything you need to make Raviolis. We are about half-way there now :-)

Above, we have four photos of my 10 year old son demonstrating for us how to build the Ravioli. Using the pasta we have already squeezed out with the past machine (more about the pasta machine later) he is showing us here four steps. Take a precut rectangle of pasta dough (approximately 2-1/4" wide and 3-1/2" long), drop 1/4 - 1/2 tsp. of filling onto one side while leaving ample space on all sides of the filling so the ends can be sealed together. Fold it over, then squeeze the edges together with your fingers being sure that there is no filling oozing out anywhere, then with a fork press hard on the two sides basically fusing the pasta together creating a water tight seal. You don't want the filling to fall out while you are boiling the Raviolis.

So when you pasta ball is done you will want to roll out the pasta so you have a 1" think mass of dough, then square off the dough with a knife and cut strips of dough about 3-1/2" long by 1" high and 1" deep.

Pinch one end of the rectangular pasta dough strip that you just created so it will catch in the rollers. This is important. Set your flat pasta roller setting to "7", run it through and then set it to "3" and run it through again and this will be the perfect thickness for Ravioli.

Here, my wife will demonstrate. See the dough strip pinched on one end being caught by the rollers as she cranks the machine?

Here she is taking the strip she just rolled out at with the "7" setting and has reset the machine to setting "3" and now she will roll it through again making it thinner, wider and longer.

Here is a close up the action.

...and here it is going through the rollers one more time.

After you have made some Raviolis, you will want to boil some water so you can do a test to be sure you have the correct thickness set with your pasta machine. Boil them for 10 minutes, take them out of the water with a slotted spoon, drain well...

...set them on a plate. Cut in half, check out the texture and smell. WoW! So nice! Now taste! If all is well, then you can proceed with making the other 98 Raviolis. If not, you might want to adjust the setting on your pasta machine.

If you do this right, the small 3-1/2"x1"x1" strip of pasta dough on the right should turn into the nice long and thin strip of pasta dough on the left.

Here is a close up to give you some idea of scale in regards to the pasta strips you will use to roll out into large strips for the Ravioli. Note, it's about 3-1/2" long.

Again, here is a close giving you some scale again. We can see here that this pasta strip is about 1" high.

OK, you are going to be making 100 Raviolis so get ready to work! This is a great time to enjoy your family and work together! :-)

Making Homemade Raviolis. Step by step photos Part 4
Finish making all the homemade Raviolis and start cooking!

This is such a beautiful thing! 100 Ravioli's all ready for cooking. Wonderful!!!

Here I have them on wax paper awaiting to be boiled.

Before I do any cooking. I let the Raviolis sit on the counter for a while while I get the kitchen all cleaned up and the table all set and ready to go. OK, things are looking pretty good here so I am almost ready to cook.

Once you start the Raviolis cooking you need everything ready to go, you want to serve these very fresh from the pot. Be sure to have the sauce ready that you want to use. You can use a nice Alfredo sauce or a nice red sauce.

This particular meal I made the Raviolis with two sauce because I have one son that loves the red sauce and one son that likes the Alfredo Sauce. I don't have a recipe for Alfredo sauce on the site yet, but all you use for Alfredo sauce is, Half and Half cream, Butter, Parmesan, Parsley and Coarse ground black Pepper.

...and here we have the Raviolis with Anthony's Spaghetti sauce on top. :-)

He is a nice photo just second before everyone sat down to dig in. Lovely!!!! You should be in this kitchen to smell how nice everything is!

These Raviolis are great for leftovers. The Raviolis that you don't cook you can freeze. This is what I do for freezing. Get a cookie sheet and two pieces of wax paper. Place one sheet of wax paper on a cookie sheet, then Raviolis on the wax paper, then another sheet of wax paper on top of that and place it in the freezer for a couple of hours.

After a couple of hours in the freezer on the cookie sheet I take them off the sheet and place them in a large freezer ziplock bag, date the bag, and throw them back in the freezer.

This is a nice Red wine that I highly recommend to have with these Raviolis and with any pasta for that matter. A really excellent wine! One of my favorites just recently discovered Clos Du Bois, a VERY nice Cabernet Sauvignon! You can read about this wine here. I recommend the "Sanoma Reserve" if you can find it.