This recipe ratio comes from the French Laundry cookbook. First time making ravioli, second attempt at making pasta from scratch. There are two parts to any noodle dish. The most important part, I've discovered is having a pasta dough that tastes good on its own. It's not too salty; it holds up well to being boiled, and when you eat it, the pasta says: eat more, eat more. The second part is packaging. No, not how the product starts out, but how it looks when it ends up on your plate.
For a pasta-making beginner, this dough didn't exactly come together like it does in all those YouTube videos about how to make pasta dough from scratch; but what I can tell you (and the cookbook says this, so it must be true) is that you cannot overknead the dough.
I hope you are in shape because kneading the pasta dough by hand is an upper body workout!
Ingredients
1 3/4 c (8 oz) all purpose flour
6 large egg yolks
1 large egg
1 1/2 tsp olive oil
1 tbsp milk
Directions
Mound the flour in the center of a Silpat mat or large cutting board. Make a well in the center large enough to accommodate the wet ingredients (milk, egg yolks, whole egg, and olive oil). Pour wet ingredients into the well.
Mixing. Using your fingers, break the eggs up and turn the flour in a circular motion (same direction, don't go all changing direction when incorporating the wet ingredients into the flour). Supposedly this circular motion helps to incorporate the flour into the eggs otherwise it'll be all lumpy. Eventually the mixture will get too tight to keep turning with your fingers.
At this stage, I thought I had more of the ingredients stuck to my hands than what was on the board. My hands looked as though I'd been sparring with the Pillsbury dough boy. Alas, I think this is normal.
Kneading. Knead the dough by pressing it in a forward motion with the heels of your hands. Do this several times until the dough doesn't feel sticky. Let the dough rest for a few minutes. Form the dough into a ball and knead it again until the dough becomes silky smooth. What was interesting that the more I kneaded the dough, the more it came off my hands and by the time I felt like I was done kneading, most of it was off my hands.
I'm not sure that the dough ever got to the silky smooth stage from kneading; but after I let it rest in a closed plastic food storage container, the dough was smooth and pliable.
The cookbook suggests that kneading can take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes. This might be true if you were a seasoned bread maker with massive forearms. I think this step took me longer.
Resting. You could wrap the dough in plastic wrap, but a sealable airtight plastic container will suffice.
Let the dough rest for 30 minutes to an hour before making it into something else, like noodles or ravioli.
Making. This batch of dough made 40 ravioli dumplings, though I'm sure more could have been made if I didn't waste so much figuring out the hand-cranked pasta machine. The cookbook says to take this ball of dough and cut it into thirds, then each third (roughly 5 oz each by weight) should be cut in half. The amount of dough that should be fed through the pasta machine is 2.5 oz. I used a digital kitchen scale to measure out the dough.
I ran the dough through the pasta machine starting from the largest width setting (7) to the second smallest (2). I found that the smallest setting on that machine makes a paper-thin, translucent sheet of pasta; maybe this is how filo dough is made. Run the pasta through the machine 2-3 times per knob setting, gradually making it thinner.
Most pasta recipes will tell you to fold it and turn it a quarter. I watched a YouTube video on this because I had no conceptual idea what the cookbook was talking about. I used an egg wash (1 egg yolk + water) with a pastry brush on one side of the ravioli and pressed the two sheets of pasta dough together after putting in the filling. That method worked well for sealing it.
