Ricotta-Prosciutto Ravioli

Ed made heaven the other day - homemade ravioli filled with ricotta, proscuitto, and maitaki mushrooms cooked in butter, in a sage-butter sauce. *drool*. The filling was delicious, but wrapped in pasta dough it was even better. Making the pasta dough takes some work, in fact I've never done it myself because it seems like too much work, but Ed isn't daunted by work. Hes better at rolling things out than me, anyway. I'm not sure I got the recipes right, its Ed, he doesn't really work from recipes, but its all approximate anyway.


Ravioli dough
This was enough dough for 21 big raviolis

2/3C flour
1 egg
A little olive oil
salt
Extra flour as needed for rolling out

Mix together the flour, the egg, a pinch or two of salt, and olive oil as needed to make the dough elastic enough to knead (I don't think it was much oil, probably a tablespoon or less). Knead the dough to bring it all together, and then let it sit for at least 30min, to hydrate the flour. Cut the dough into four pieces, and commence rolling - use lots and lots of flour to keep things from sticking. You want to roll out the dough until it is 1/8-1/16" thick, more or less - pretty durn thin. Ideally, roll it into long rectangular pieces, as that makes for easier filling.

Filling
This also filled 21 (large) ravioli just perfectly

1C ricotta
~2C mushrooms, uncooked
~1/4lb prosciutto
salt
1 egg
Butter for cooking the mushrooms
~1C grated parmesan cheese

Chop the mushrooms into little pieces and cook the mushrooms in butter with some salt until they have given up all their moisture. Add them to a bowl with the ricotta, prosciutto (also cut into little pieces), the egg, a pinch or two of salt, and the parmesan. Mix it all together. Use it to fill the ravioli.



Assembly
Take one of your rolled-out pieces of dough, and put down 4-6 little blobs of filling. Fold the dough over on itself, and really seal it around each ravioli. Then cut them apart, and trim the edges. If the edges won't stick together, you might have to employ an egg wash to make them stick.



Sage butter sauce
1/2 stick butter
2-4 tbs fresh sage

Melt the butter in a small saucepan. Add the sage. Cook, on low, for ~5min (I'm making that number up, I have no idea how long Ed cooked the sage). I think the longer you cook it, the more sage-y the butter will become. Go ahead and taste a sage leaf - they're crunchy, buttery, and delicious. Ed then took out the sage leaves and chopped them up, then returned them to the butter, for proper distribution on the pasta. Don't skip this step, its totally worth it. You can do it with any fresh herb, but sage works particularly well with the rich creaminess of the ricotta and prosciutto.


Once you've filled all your ravioli (you might have to take all the edge scraps and roll those out to make another ravioli sheet), cook them in a huge pot of boiling water for 3-5 minutes. Not very long, but long enough to cook the egg in the filling.

Pour the sage butter over the ravioli when they're done.