Pumpkin Ravioli Recipe

Pumpkin Ravioli Recipe Divya Gugnani: At Wolfgang Puck’s American Grille at Borgata at Atlantic City, New Jersey, West Coast meets East Coast with contemporary California cuisine. I'm Divya Gugnani and I'm ready for some delicious comfort food, perfect for any nightlike. So let's go behind the burner and meet the chef. I'm here with the executive Chef Aram Mardigian. Aram, I see beautiful squash. Aram: We brought in. We have some butternuts squash. We have some Kabocha Squash. This is an acorn squash and we have many other types too that we like to use. We’re going to make pumpkin ravioli with brown butter, sage and ricotta salad. Divya Gugnani: It sounds yummy. Aram: When we’re making ravioli, we make fresh pasta everyday. So we like it to be really nice soft texture. When you use semolina which is great, I love using semolina too when we’re making noodles when we want it to be it a little bit of a dryer harder pasta that’s when we use semolina. But for this recipe, we want the egg dough because we want it to be very, very soft. Divya Gugnani: So the tip is skip semolina if you want to nice egg dough. Aram: Yes. Okay, now I start out with a fresh pasta dough and we've sheeted it out very thin as you can see. And we did likely dust it with all purpose flour. Now we’re going to make the ravioli. We want to make sure enough is underneath. But we don’t want to whole lot of flour on top of it, so we’re going to dust it off just a little bit. I have a basic egg wash here. Its just whole eggs whipped up. We’re going to just slightly brush the dough. You can use a pastry bag if you have pastry at home. You can also buy these disposal plastic pastry bags that are available on a lot of bake shops around and it makes so much easier to make your pasta. I'm going to put the filling about two inches apart from each other and go right down the line and my pasta dough is nice and white. I'm going to be able to do two lines of this. And we’re going to make some half moon shaped raviolis and then I'm going to show you a trick how to make a tortellini out of that, if you want to take it a step further. We’re going to cut this right in half. And then we’re going to fold this right over like this. Now we’re going to find where our dough is. You can see like through the dough, so it’s easy. We’re just kind of curve into a half moon shape. Now these can be found in a lot of different kitchen supply stores. There are just little cutters. We try to call pasta cutters. Some people will call them cookie cutters. And we’re going to cut these into half moon shape raviolis. All the way down. Now there's your half moon ravioli right there which is a really nice shaped ravioli. Now here’s the trick to turn it into tortellini. You got your ravioli. You got to dip your finger in the egg white, so just touch each hand right there. Hold it, press it in the middle and pinch. Okay, with the flat part away from you, just a touch of egg white on each corner and press in the middle and pinch, tortellini. Okay, we’re done shaping our tortellini. We started with ravioli. We went to tortellini. So look how beautiful they are. They came out real nice. They are so nice and fresh and soft. And now we’re going to cook in a little bit of brown butter and sage. Divya Gugnani: So, I'm ready to cook. Aram: We are ready to cook. Yes, we have a pan that’s heating up. Now this is very -- pasta has to be simple, I think. And that’s why you can't try too hard with pasta. We have some simple ingredients. We have some butter. We have some sage and pasta. And we’re going to put some -- one of those pieces in there right now. Divya Gugnani: There we go. Aram: Okay, excellent. It’s going to sizzle a little bit. We have a sage sprig right there and we’re going to put the whole sprig in because we want to take it out before we serve it. Divya Gugnani: So it will just get the aromatic inside and use the butter and then you can take it out and -- delicate flavor. Aram: Exactly. Now it’s the perfect time, we’re going to add some of this -- a tortellini to the water because the pasta is all about timing. And pasta has to be served immediately. It’s not something you cook and you let it sit around for a while. The butter is starting to brown. Now I'm going to take it off the fryer because when you add -- when water hits hot oil, it can be a little bit dangerous at times. So we’ll turn it right off. Let it cool down a little bit. You don’t want to make a mess in your kitchen. Now our tortellini is ready. Nice and soft, ready to go. Now this is going to sizzle. This is going to sizzle a little bit. There we go. We’ll turn the fire back on now. Now we’re just going to make sure all the pasta is coated with the brown butter a little bit. So we add a little salt to season it. Be careful with the salt. You don’t want to add too much because we’re going to add some type of cheese to this which is already going to have a little salt content to it as well. Now we’re going to take the sage out and we’re going to plate the pasta. You see how simple that is? Now I have more trick for you. This is called the Ricotta Salad. It’s a Sicilian sour coated cheese, it’s a fresh and salted and dried in ricotta cheese and it’s very interesting cheese and it goes really nicely with this dish. You can shave it just like reggiano over a pasta dish. Divya Gugnani: It’s beautiful because this pasta is warm. It melts right on it. Aram: Yeah. And it will just melt right to it. Divya Gugnani: So I'm ready to eat the tortellini. Aram: I'm ready too. We’re missing one thing, we need some red wine. Divya Gugnani: That’s your job, not mine. Aram: All right. Divya Gugnani: Let's dig in. This is the best part. Oh, I got to get that little sage leaf. It’s very creamy, kind of fluffy. Aram: Yeah. What do you mean fluffy? Divya Gugnani: Thank you so much for having us. Aram: It’s my pleasure. Divya Gugnani: Stay tuned to Behind the Burner, where we give you the tips, tricks and techniques that are lighting the culinary world on fire. For the recipe, Q&A, photos and more, visit behindtheburner.com.