friederike's Reviews
4 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 4Sort by: Title 
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The Art of Pasta
By Lucio Galletto
Lantern - 2011
Basic Pasta Dough : page 11
A few things were vague about the recipe, such as when to add the salt, or if you had to point the dough in a specific direction when rolling it out for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th time, but all in all, it worked! And it tasted quite nice. We had our pasta with the Classic Bolognese Sauce and were very happy with it.
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Beetroot Ravioli / Casunziei : page 222
It's very delicious, it's beautiful (though not as brilliant as theirs is - see photo, mine left, theirs right), but make sure you start early enough with preparations!
I was a bit worried that if I'd follow the instructions and peel and cut the beetroot into cubes, the beetroot would bleed and loose all colour - but then again, cooking them whole would mean at least an hour cooking time, and given the time and the temperatures, I wasn't too keen on that. Turns out I shouldn't have bothered, I had to cook them for 50 minutes anyway to get them reasonably soft. I mashed them with a potato masher, and puréed them with a hand blender because they wouldn't mash well enough.
We also wondered about the pasta dough, as no explanation is given why he uses a different recipe for this dish and not for any of the others. We had the idea that it tore easily, but once we rolled out the dough that wasn't a problem.
We used a circle shape with a 7cm diameter as we thought 5cm would be far too small to actually add any filling. 7cm was just big enough for 1 teaspoon of filling (as opposed to 2 tsp), but once we cooked the pasta we had the idea that the ravioli became larger and flatter, and that we could have added more filling. I guess one way to achieve this would be to make a 5cm base and a 6 or 7cm top, as the top needs to be slightly larger to cover everything.
We also had a small problem with the ravioli sticking to the baking parchment after the resting period. I'm not sure using a dish cloth as instructed would have entirely prevented this, I would recommend adding some extra flour and turning them halfway during the resting period (the top layer will dry out slightly, while the bottom layer will not, and will therefore stick...). This made two of our 16 ravioli tear (we made only half the recipe today, with the rest of the filling and the dough waiting in the fridge for Monday - my guess is that we'll have too much filling left over)
Regarding the flavours, I loved the butter with the poppy seed. I could definitely see me using this for cooked or roasted vegetables too, eg. cauliflower. Be careful with the nutmeg, it will be stronger in the ravioli than you'll expect it to be.
This is definitely something you would serve guests as an appetizer during a fancy meal. In this case, the resting period is actually in your favour as it gives you time for other dishes or entertaining. I wouldn't prepare it for the two of us again, it's just too much work.
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Soooo delicious! Additionally, the black pasta dough looked really cool. We only needed 8g of ink (don't know how much that is in tbsps, but I guess less than the 1 tbsp required) to produce a beautiful black pasta dough.
Instead making the ravioli on several long pieces of dough and then cut them afterwards, we found out it was easier to cut circles first (a smaller one, and a larger one for on top), then add the filling on the smaller one and cover with the larger one - this way it was easier to prevent any bubbles of air to be caught in the ravioli.
The tomato sauce was very good, too, and went really well with the ravioli, there just wasn't enough, and I think a little garlic might have added some extra punch was well.
The recipe made about 28 ravioli, though we still have at least 1/3 of the dough (but no filling).
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Classic Bolognese Sauce : page 56
Very nice! It was quite a lot of work (mainly prepping all the ingredients) and had to simmer for quite a while, so this isn't what you should plan for a midweek dinner, but it tasted nice. It contained only a few spoons of tomato purée - I think I would prefer a more tomatoey sauce. Though it didn't say so, I would roughly chop the chicken livers next time. We made our own fresh pasta with the Basic Pasta Dough recipe, and were very glad we did.
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