Pasta can be a great gourmet creation if you just invest some time to do it yourself from scratch. I served this one as a main course for lunch with friends and it went down very well with the public. 🙂 Apart of the taste, it looks beautiful on the plates with all that colors!
Ingredients
For the pasta dough:
- 400 g flour
- 2 eggs
- 125 ml milk
- Pinch of salt
For the beetroot filling:
- 500 g beetoroot
- 50 g butter
- 1-2 tablespoons breadcrumbs
- 100 g Ricotta
- 1 egg
- Freshly grated nutmeg, black pepper and salt
For the poppy butter:
- 80 g butter
- 1 tablespoon poppy seed, roughly crushed with mortar and pestle
- 80 g Pecorino, freshly grated
Recipe
For the pasta dough sieve the flour on a working surface and heap it together. Add the salt. In the middle make a mould and add the eggs. With a fork stir the eggs slowly in the flour until they are sticky but not liquid anymore. Add the milk little by little to the eggs, stirring every time a little bit so that the flour gets combined with the liquid part. Now use both your hands and start kneading the dough. It has to become completely homogenous. The kneading process goes for 8-10 minutes. Every time knead the dough ball with your palms, make it flat to form a small disk, turn the disk for 45 degrees and start kneading again. Repeat this until the dough is completely homogenous and rather hard by paying attention that you turn it always in the same direction. The dough shouldn’t stick to the working surface. If so, add some more flour. After kneading wrap the dough into plastic foil and let it sit at room temperature for 30 minutes.
In the meantime, prepare the filling. Peel the beetroot and cook it in salty water for 20-30 minutes until very soft. Drain and process it to purée in your blender. Melt the butter at low temperature and roast one tablespoon of breadcrumbs in it. Add the beetroot purée to the pan and cook everything together for 5 minutes or longer at middle temperature until all liquid has evaporated. Then add this mixture to a bowl where you mixed Ricotta and the egg and season to taste with nutmeg, salt and pepper. If the filling is still liquid, add some more breadcrumbs. Leave to cool down.
Roll out the pasta dough as thin as you can. This is important so that your ravioli are not hard and chewy after cooking. The dough will become almost transparent when rolled out. Prepare your ravioli cutter or if you don’t have this, you can just use the knife to cut them out. Distribute 1-2 teaspoons of filling (depending on the size of your cutter). Brush the space between the filling portions with. Now cover the first piece of dough with filling with another piece of rolled dough. Press the space between the filling so that the two layers of dough stick together. Try also to squeeze out any air bubbles which formed after covering the filling. This will prevent bursting of the ravioli while cooking. Cut the ravioli out with your cutter and put them on a lightly floured kitchen towel making sure that they are not touching each other. Leave them to rest for 30 minutes.
Cook the ravioli in quite salty water for 3-5 minutes, or until they swim to the surface.
To finish, heat the butter and crushed poppy on middle heat until it slowly starts to foam. Be careful not to burn it! Arrange the ravioli on the plates, sprinkle with grated Pecorino and poppy butter and enjoy immediately. 🙂
Merium
Adapted from Pasta – eine Kunst by Lucio Galletto & David Dale.