Burlington, Vermont – December 21, 2011
Leading up to the holidays we are having co-workers share favorite recipes.
For our morning producer, Cat Viglienzoni, that means handmade ravioli. Her family makes more than 1,300 each year. She took a camera home to California and filmed the process.
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Each family has their holiday traditions. Being Italian, ours is homemade ravioli, which we make at my grandparent's house in Soquel, Calif.
It all begins with the filling, which we start preparing the day before. This year we knew we had even more work than usual, because once my grandmother found out I wanted to take a few back to Vermont with me, in true Italian fashion, she bought twice as much meat.
We don't really measure anything. We start by taking parsley and a few cloves of garlic and blending those together. Then, we add onion and raw Italian sausage. That mixture is spread onto slices of meat sprinkled with salt and pepper. Those are rolled up and wrapped together with kitchen twine. The meat rolls are then placed in a pot with oil to fry on the stove until done.
Later, we add them to tomato sauce and reduce the temperature. Eventually, the meat will be taken from the sauce and refrigerated overnight.
Day two of ravioli-making begins by finishing up the filling. We unwrap the twine from the meat rolls and put them through the meat grinder with some cooked pork chops and spinach. Then, grandma adds breadcrumbs, Parmesan cheese, an egg, cinnamon and cloves, blending together. She says if the mixture is too dry and doesn't clump together well, add another egg.
In our family, we have a system. While one person makes the meat filling, another makes the pasta dough-- this year, a task for my Uncle Rick. For each batch of dough, three cups of flour, three large eggs, and a 1/4 cup of water are mixed in a food processor. It's then kneaded into a dough that we will roll into pasta layers. We generally need a few rounds of dough.
Once the dough is ready, we use a pasta-making machine to roll it out evenly and efficiently. This is one of the trickier stages because the dough can be temperamental. Too sticky and it will shred in the machine. Too dry and it will not stretch over the ravioli tray later on.
Even with a rolling machine the technique takes practice, and my mom is a pro. The key is to be patient, careful and gentle, gradually increasing the thinness. Leftover scraps of dough are kneaded together and re-used.
Some choose to make their ravioli freehand, but we use ravioli trays. To avoid a pile of ripped dough and spilled meat, the trays need to first be coated with flour. That will prevent the dough from sticking even after the edges are closed. A sheet of rolled dough is laid on as the base and stretched to fit.
Then, take a handful of the meat mixture and begin filling. This is my job, and there are a couple tricks. The first is to make sure you don't try to force too much meat into one square; otherwise the ravioli will burst open when they're cooked. But too little filling results in flat ravioli. Also, don't pack the filling too tightly, or the ravioli will come out hard.
To close the ravioli, take another sheet of dough and lay it on top. Gently stretch it to fit across. To press the air out of the ravioli, use a small roller to gently roll over and between the rows and columns, pressing more firmly between the grooves to seal them tightly. Roll over the sides of the tray to seal them as well.
When I'm done I hand the ravioli off to be separated, a task usually left to my sister, Krista, who's already dressed for the holiday. Using a ravioli cutter, she trims off the excess dough from the sides. She then cuts out the individual ravioli and places them on a floured tray to freeze.
Once the ravioli are frozen, we remove them from the trays and place them into containers to store, using lightly-floured wax paper to separate the layers and keep the ravioli from sticking to each other. Once the container is sealed, they can be stored in the freezer until Christmas or even as long as Easter.
Often-- and sometimes on purpose-- we have extra dough leftover. Since we won't let it go to waste, we add an attachment to the pasta maker to make homemade noodles. Those are left to dry before they're frozen.
We like to keep track of our ravioli total, so Krista makes a tally for each tray she separates. This year was a record total for our family, at more than 1,300 ravioli. Even for a few families of Italians, we will have more than enough for Christmas and Easter and a few individual dinners in between.
This isn't a quick recipe, and it takes hours. That's why it's a family tradition, because it takes a family to prepare for, entertain each other during, and yes, clean up after, a couple days of ravioli-making.
But for us, Christmas means a dinner highlighted by a dish that looks like this... Even when you're thousands of miles apart.
