Spinach Ravioli (Not Your Regular Pasta Dough)

Directions

• Prepare the dough. In a large bowl start mixing durum wheat flour with egg, salt and a bit of water. You can knead the mixture by hands or using a stand mixer. If you have a stand mixer, use it, it will speed up the process. Very important here is to understand how much water to add. Due to few factors like temperature, humidity of your flour or how big is your egg, the mixture will need a specific amount of water that you can’t decide at the beginning. So add water little by little until you get to a crumbly dough (you can watch the video to understand this step better).
• When you get to a crumbly dough move it from the mixer to a well floured surface and start kneading it with your hands. It will be a bit hard at the beginning, but the more you knead the more elastic your dough will get. Knead it for a few minutes, until feels softer at your touch. Wrap the dough and let it rest for 15-20 mins.
• Prepare the spinach and Mascarpone filling. In a large pan, make a saute with butter and garlic and add the spinach. Cook until tender, this will take about 10 minutes. Make sure you will remove all the water from the spinach before adding them to the Mascarpone cheese. Having spinach that are too wheat may lead to a liquid filling, that you won’t be able to use to fill up your ravioli. Blend spinach with mascarpone, salt and Parmesan until creamy,
• Roll the fresh pasta. Cut a piece of pasta dough and wrap the rest to keep it from drying up and set aside. Use a rolling pin (or your hands) to flatten the first piece of dough into an oval disk. Then, flour the disk, set your pasta machine to the widest (0-1) and run the oval disk through the pasta machine’s rollers. In this case you don’t have to fold the two edges of the dough towards the center and roll it again (as you would do for the classic pasta dough).
  
  Just keep running the dough through the machine’s rollers adjusting the gear settings. Turning the gear will change the width of the rollers. Usually 0 or 1 are the widest, while 8-9 are the tightest. Roll the disc of dough one time per each gear settings until reaching the thickness you want. I reached until 7 in my case, because I had lots of filling and I wanted to keep it a bit thicker to feel the taste of the dough . But you can make it thinner. It’s up to you.
• Spoon your filling. I used about one teaspoon of spinach and Mascarpone filling for each raviolo, and I placed the filling in the middle, down length, measuring a distance of 2 fingers between the fillings. Now, you can brush lengthwise the edges of the pasta sheet with some water. This insures that the pasta will seal, when you roll the bottom side of the sheet on top of the upper side (check the video to see how I do this step)
• Press the air out of the filling and slice the ravioli. Crucial step to avoid “accidents” during the boiling part. Make sure to press all around your ravioli’s filling towards the edges to push all air out. After your air is all out you can slice the ravioli using a ravioli cutter.
• Prepare the sauce melting butter and keep some great Parmesan cheese on the side. You can add sage to give butter extra flavor, but it’s not mandatory.
• Cook spinach ravioli. In a large pot boil water and add salt. When the water is boiling add a sprinkle of extra virgin olive oil and add some ravioli into the water. Ravioli are ready when they start floating, but wait half a minute, then drain them with a draining spoon. I recommend to always taste one before, so you can understand if they need to cook longer or not (based on your taste). When they are properly cooked add them to the sauce and continue with the rest, until you finish your batch. Serve warm with your butter sauce and sprinkled with grated Parmesan