Italy: Crab and Ricotta Ravioli in Sage Butter

So making ravioli is fairly straight forward even without the pasta making machine, but it certainly is easier if you have one! (I’ll assume you do not, for the sake of this recipe).

This one is a dish that packs plenty of seafood flavor, freshness from the lemon and coziness that come from the sage butter. Honestly, sage butter really does not get the spotlight it deserves in the culinary sphere.

Generally speaking when it comes to making ravioli, if you want to optimize your time, I recommend to start with making the dough. You’ll need to let the dough rest for roughly 30 minutes, and that’s a great time to make your filling.

What you’ll need

* This is your entire shopping list, I’ll explain what goes for the dough and what for the filling in a bit
6 medium eggs
300g flour *(roughly, depends on flour and size of eggs, really)*
150-200g white crab meat
Zest of 1 lemon
100g parmigiano *(and then more for grating on top)*
2 cloves of garlic
200-250g ricotta
Parsley
Chilli powder
Salt & Pepper
Olive oil
Oregano *(I used dried here)*
Sage
Butter *(I used around 100g)*

Tools you’ll need:
Rolling pin, brush (And a cookie cutter or the squiggly rolling cutter thing if you’re fancy like that, I guess.. I’m not)

Now… First thing first.. the dough!

Separating the yolks

There are a number of ways to do this, but honestly the easiest is to break the full egg into a tin where you will keep your whites and then just scooping out the yolk with your hand. Be careful, but it works better than you’d think!

I say where you’ll keep your egg whites, because although you won’t need them anymore here, there are many great recipes you can use them for!

Start by putting your flour on to a clean surface. Make a small little well in the middle of it - this is where your eggs and yolks will be going.

Here, you’ll be using 5 of your eggs. The first egg goes fully into the dough mix, but the rest will just be yolks. For this, spoiler alert, you will need to separate the yolks from the egg whites.

Depending on the size of your eggs, you may need a bit more or less flour than I outlined.

You want the dough to have a nice consistency but not be too dry. So here you’ll need to really watch for how the ingredients come together.

Break up your egg yolks and white and gently mix them in the middle of the flour.

Once the mixture is more or less consistent, you can start to incorporate the perimeter flour, little by little. Do mind not to break the borders down and have it spill everywhere. Here, you’re working inside out.

Once the mixture looks like it is coming together and is getting a bit more solid, you can add a few drops of olive oil in to the mix (like in the image below).

At this point you can also let go of the folk and start to slowly knead the dough with your hands, gathering the flour as you go until you have a good consistency.