4 Levels of Ravioli: Amateur to Food Scientist | Epicurious

[Music] hi i'm onika and i'm a level one chef hi i'm gabrielle and i'm a level two chef i'm frank i'm a chef at the institute of color education and i've been a chef for 24 years today i'm going to make a ravioli so i am not experienced in making ravioli this recipe is supposed to embody the epitome of springtime like springtime in tuscany i've never been to tuscany maybe someday today i'm making a duck ravioli with a nettle pasta they're around for a very short amount of time in the spring i like their flavor i like what they add to this pasta [Music] now i got this from the supermarket you don't need to roll your pasta you don't need to do flour and put in an oven at 27 hours later making your own pasta just makes a world of difference even if you don't want to make it necessarily i so would recommend getting your pasta from the refrigerated section as opposed to you know boxed and dried it tastes totally different i think you're gonna get a way more springy and and soft and silky sort of texture when you're making pasta from scratch i hope you're ready and now we're gonna make our puree for our pasta so nettles nettles are basically just a plant that grows in the wild and they have these little spikes on them if you rub this against your skin those little spikes will shoot a little bit of acid into your skin and irritate you so why do we eat these because they're delicious right they taste kind of like a tangy spinach so first thing we're going to do is blanch the nettles and i'm only going to go in there for a few minutes take it out right into our ice water once the nettles are cool we're just going to take the leaves that were separated from the stem and put them in here but you can see right now i can hold these without getting stung time to start making my pasta first thing is i'm just going to go ahead and crack my eggs there's a lot of eggs let's get cracking sorry i had to these are ready to be added into my flour and turned into dough we blanched the nettles squeezed them out got them fairly dry now what we're going to do is blend them with our duck eggs how are duck eggs different than chicken eggs well they're a little bit bigger and they're a little bit richer they have a little more flavor than chicken eggs because ducks eat different things than chickens we got our nettle and duck egg puree ready let's make the pasta you can just go it's a box of pasta you just grab it normally it's on the bottom shelf and you just get it and now it's here so i have two types of flour the semolina flour is great for making pasta i believe because of the how much more absorbent it is definitely all-purpose flour should be sifted then i'm gonna mix this below i'm using a italian double zero flour gives your pasta a nice silkiness salt up your water and then take your pasta noodles and you just give them a bath by putting your children in the bath don't kick your brother i'm forming my well this is where things are tricky let's be honest i'm a level two chef this might not work out this might get messy so make a nice large volcano i'm looking at the volume of liquid that i have and i want to make enough so that this doesn't kind of pour out all over the table so let's hope my my little jacuzzi holds up making pasta is one of these things that is not as difficult as people think so far so good oh boy oh so far not so good mayday mayday now i'm gonna take a nice big pinch of salt i'm gonna whisk it together and now i'm gonna start to bring my flour in slowly until i have a dough that i can handle with my hands i'm slowly whisking in the egg as it's man am i level one today so now my lasagna noodles are boiling i got them from the supermarket they're gonna be right there they're just gonna cook and what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna start cutting in this flour right a little bit of flour in my hand start bringing it together starting to sweat though that's the problem with making pasta by hand you have to be sweating a little if you're not sweating you're not doing it right the olive oil is going in a little salt and i'm gonna knead it really well because it needs it needs it i'm gonna cook this for like about 10 minutes because i want the noodles to be like wobbly i like to knead my dough a pretty good amount because i want it to get springy see it's like starting to spring back really nicely so what happens if i press on it you see it springs back that means i've worked the gluten and i can let this rest now we made fresh fastado i'm gonna wrap it in some plastic wrap and just let it rest for about 20 minutes to a half hour room temperature in the fridge for 30 to 40 minutes so i think that they're ready are you ready for the next step yeah i think so time to make my pasta with a rolling pin so let's roll so i'm just gonna do about a third of our pasta dough so i like to cut it up into sections so four equal parts well i flatten it out i'm gonna turn my machine on and i'm just going to roll it through i don't want to say using a pasta maker is cheating so i'm not going to say that i'm just not going to say that after i roll it the first time just a dusting of flour i'm going to do a book fold and what this does is it helps even up our pasta it'll be a little more uniform when i roll it through the second time so let's roll that through see it's nice and squared up you can kind of go ahead and shape it into that starter shape and now i have something that will probably more easily roll into a rectangle now this i can really get up there and push around when i'm working with the pasta dough i use the backs of my hands not my fingers because fingers tend to poke through let's go down the numbers see take them out one by one so yeah you want to rinse your noodles let me tell you why because my mother did it like you have to rinse noodles because it was just soaking in all this muckety muck the machine lets you get to a thinner pasta right you can do this by hand with a rolling pin but the machine really does a great job of getting it super thin i'm sure you'll get more perfectly thin pasta that way but i don't know this is pretty thin too and when it comes to ravioli you want this pasta to be really thin because it's two layers of pasta though okay now so i took them out of the water and they're on my cutting board but let me tell you what happened last time it was hard for them to like stick together so i rinsed them last time so now i'm like maybe i should just rinse one and see what happens and then we'll do a little comparison this is my nice first sheet of pasta okay i have my nice sheet of pasta there i can shut the machine off so now next step for my ravioli filling the first step is to cure the duck for my duck comb feet duck confit is a way of curing and preserving duck and this kind of goes back to pre-refrigeration you cure the duck with salt it takes out a lot of the moisture it flavors the duck and then you cook it in its own fat and store it in its own fat uh at kind of cellar temperature and it wouldn't go bad because this cure gets washed off afterwards i'm really just gonna whack it up stems and all and it's gonna go into my bowl first things first i'm going to go ahead and zest my lemon i love lemon zest i feel like lemon zest adds so much to a dish and i have my handy dandy little juicer here shallots i'm just going to take the peel off so just do a little rough chop on this a little garlic you know you always need a nice little aromatic all the salt goes in sugar i'm going to take my bay leaves i always like to use fresh cracked black pepper this is how i make it better than gabby's no i have my parmesan it's already uh grated so now i have my mozzarella and you just press down to add in my peas because i want to kind of mash them you know my nicknames pee because i have a tiny head what i'm going to do with my cure is i'm going to put a layer down on the bottom of my dish over here and then i'm gonna put a fair amount of cure on each leg it's important that we use a coarse salt for this if you use a very fine salt the duck legs will be extremely salty i'm gonna wrap this up and put it in the fridge for as long as i possibly can get a little bit of your aggression out you know sometimes someone sends you a dumb email and you have to respond to it that guy the guy is like i'm not trying to throw you under the bus as he throws you under the bus like just think about that guy his name is tom i made these duck legs the other day and i cured them for about 24 hours what i want to do with these now is get off the excess salt i'm just going to brush that off but i'm just going to put them in this bowl of water and dry these off really well and now we're going to cook them the ricotta emphasizes the sweetness and the peas and vice versa add in pecorino romano and that's gonna bring up the saltiness factor my salt some pepper we're gonna cook the duck now i'm using rendered duck fat lard works for this as well so all i'm gonna do is take my fat we want it to be melted and warm and let's put our duck legs in the fat i'm gonna put these in a preheated oven at about 250 degrees for about two to three hours okay so i'm going to go ahead and put some of my lemon juice in and then i want to incorporate this really well because these are all going to be going into with individual ravioli the duck comfy has cooked for about two and a half hours now i'm gonna pull the meat off the bones all of my duck legs are picked and all i'm gonna do is give this a nice rough chop and now we can finish the filling the mozzarella is gonna melt down like gooey and the parmesan what it's gonna do is it's just gonna like make everything stick together it's kind of like a cheese marriage now we get to assemble our filling i have a nice chunk of parmigiano reggiano we want to take some of this thyme and just pick some leaves in there duck goes in one duck egg and mascarpone cheese once the mascarpone melts and the parmesan cheese melts we're going to have a nice kind of creamy filling so now that our cheese is ready i'm going to start cutting our sheets i'm down the middle a very light coating of egg wash and this is just basically glue just kind of a more guarantee that things are going to stick nicely because we want to take our cheese got mozzarella first and you want to put them to one end of the sheet and just kind of eyeball a tablespoon of filling for each ravioli a nice amount of filling in the middle and what i'm going to do is i'm going to make a little cradle and then i'm going to take a duck egg yolk and put an egg yolk in each a whole egg yolk inside a ravioli just a just an egg and just you just bite into now it's time to go ahead and lay my second sheet down over top and i'm gonna lay it over give it a little stretch i'm gonna go around try and get all of the air out otherwise though i don't really have much of a method so now we're testing to see if they're sticking together or not and so the clean girls are what are you guys doing are you not so much this they're hugging and kissing look at this okay so don't rinse your noodles once you boil your pasta it'll get a little bit more rigid and then you don't have to be quite so delicate with it it's it's not like a little baby bird anymore one thing that you want to make sure of when you do these ravioli is that you get a good seal i put the egg wash on and then i press down nice and tight so now what i'm doing is i'm making sure that they're sticking together so you know you put a little arm muscle in there and you make sure that they stay together the stamp is to kind of give yourself a nice edge this one looks and feels really good i'm gonna go ahead and just stamp that here's my first little ravioli and i'm gonna cut the ravioli with that okay i think that ravioli in any shape or form are delicious so a ravioli should be square i think that's just what the italian said i do like circles better just for the fact that it's a little less dough so what i do now is i'm gonna crimp the edges a little dust my tray really well just so they don't stick but that's basically what i'm gonna cook for one person so now that i've sealed them to perfection i'm going to transfer them over to my parchment paper now we're going to make the sauce all we have to do for this right now is melt the butter once it's melted we'll get the ravioli in the water and we'll finish the sauce i have some gently boiling water i'm going to salt it a nice generous amount of salt so i don't want this to be at a full rolling boil when i add the pasta because they're fairly delicate and if it's boiling away like crazy it's going to beat my ravioli up so i'm just gonna get these lay them in nice and gently so my pasta's going in when they float they're done i'm gonna give them about three to four minutes and then we're gonna put them in with our sauce so this is only taking like real time about 10 seconds all right we have a floater looks great i think we're ready for the sauce you guys feeling saucy okay so am i i'd like for it my oil to heat up slowly i'm gonna chop my garlic and garlic is essential for any kind of pasta just chop it up nice so the first thing i'm going to do is make a roux it's basically equal parts butter and flour the thing about a roux is this is going to thicken my sauce i'm going to take my butter okay i'm going to be sure that i get them the yolk side up because i don't really want the yolk to burst at all so now that my garlic is chopped i'm going to put that into the pan okay and so now i'm going to whisk in my pasta water so this is salted water essentially some black pepper so now we're going to chop up a little bit of the basil all right that smells so good at this point i'm going to add in my peas as well as my lemon zest now i'm going to go ahead and add in my lemon juice pinch of salt i need some sugar and then you just start dropping your tomatoes you need the sugar to take some of the acidity out of the tomato it just makes it taste like a sauce to the left take it back now y'all one hop because now it's time to add in my ravioli so i'm just kind of plopping them in there you just want the cheese to melt inside i'm gonna finish with some parmesan in my sauce and what the parmesan is gonna do it's gonna help thicken my sauce it's going to melt a little they look very rustic very homemade but that's what i wanted that was the goal i do have a little bit of olive oil that i am going to use just to kind of brighten that flavor a little bit oh i think i'm ready all we got to do is plate this up and give it a taste so i'm going to plate the ravioli i always put one in the middle i think five is the perfect amount because it just sits so nicely on the plate it's like flower petals that's what it looks like you don't need too much sauce right the main star is the ravioli i'm thinking we'll do five so we'll see who makes the cut on america's next top ravioli i'm only gonna serve one ravioli per person just a little bit of that buttery goodness just a little bit of black pepper i'm gonna take some of this fresh basil just a little bit and some parmesan cheese just a nice sprinkling it's snowing it's snowing it's snowing and then top it off with some nice fresh minced parsley duck ravioli and this is my rareoli this is my ravioli and that's my duck ravioli wow this is good that duck yolk is so rich ravioli is a wonderful filled pasta with so many options for everything from filling to sauce let's see how each of our three chefs made theirs onika used store-bought pasta you don't have to knead it or roll it and its consistent texture and thickness adds to the convenience you can also store it at home for a long time these noodles just fine fresh pasta like the pasta made by gabby and frank is made with eggs and flour mixed together with minimal or no water added sometimes there is a blood spot in the egg and that's just very natural sometimes it actually means that the egg is fresher actually a blood spot usually means the hen has a ruptured blood vessel while she was making or laying the egg it's okay to eat or remove but definitely a little yucky it's no indication of freshness today i learned something sealing your ravioli is important after boiling there's some residual starch on the pasta this starch from the pasta layers will adhere and gelatinize when heated and seal the edges well if they're pressed together firmly onika figured this out on our own by experimenting with rinsed and unrinsed noodles it's not sticking at all the unrinsed pasta had more residual starch to stick together in gelatinize when onika's ravioli were cooked also although you couldn't really see it the residual starch makes the pasta less smooth and allows the starches to connect and interact easier great work onika i love having another food scientist on the show i'm an expert now i'm a ravioli lasagna noodle connoisseur expert lady they're still at the bottom of this of this uh water and you want them to rise a little bit and they're not rising people will say okay they're floating they're ready these are not cooked yet rose i have no idea why people think the ravioli is cooked when it floats maybe you do floating doesn't indicate doneness when things sink in a fluid it's normally because the density of the object is higher than the density of the fluid when things float the density is lower than the density of the fluid so the ravioli only need a little push to rise to the top of the boiling water the push comes from convective currents in the water but whatever the cause is this floating doesn't relate to whether your ravioli is thoroughly cooked i guess i could google it but that would be boring each chef's recipe included a fabulous combination of delicious ingredients but as usual frank elevated his ravioli and decided to work with nettles nettles have an earthy slightly tart flavor and are loaded with chlorophyll a a fat soluble pigment which will add a deep green color to pasta and retains the green color when boiled in water a lot of questions come up when you're making ravioli not all of them have easy answers i don't know what the plural of this is i think it might be raviolo because it's a single ravioli with an italian name like proto i'll defer to frank and concur that a single ravioli is a raviolo ravioli or raviolo i hope you'll take some of these tips and ideas from our three extraordinary chefs to make the most delicious filled pasta

Channel: Epicurious

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Keywords: 4 levels, 4 levels of ravioli, best ravioli, best ravioli recipe, cheese ravioli, easy ravioli, epi, epicurious, epicurious frank, expert ravioli, fancy ravioli, filled pasta, frank proto, fresh pasta, fresh ravioli, homemade pasta, homemade ravioli, homemade ravioli recipe, how to make ravioli, italian ravioli, make ravioli, perfect ravioli, ravioli, ravioli filling, ravioli filling recipe, ravioli from scratch, ravioli recipe, raviolis, raviolis recipe, veggie ravioli

Id: r7Ut_O2VCyg

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021