La Cucina di Kat: Striped Pasta

My Quest to make Striped Pasta

Well I admit, I think I may have a screw loose at times! Sometimes I get a little obsessive when I cook and for the longest time I’ve been thinking about striped ravioli’s. You know those cute little packaged ones you find in places like Sam’s Club? How on earth do they make them striped?

So I figured I'd try a few things when I was making some fresh pasta one day. First of all, I tried laying colored strips side by side and feeding them through the pasta machine. It really didn’t work and I ended up with holes in my pasta. Then, I remembered seeing an episode of Cake Boss where they were making striped fondant. They layed strips of different color fondant on a base and ran it through the press. So why not pasta?

On this particular day I decided to make Lobster/Crab ravioli and it is quite time consuming. I have to say though…it’s all worth it when your Guests eat it and you hear the ooohs and ahhhhs and they say it's delicious! I served it with a smoked salmon cream sauce and I have to admit, it was good!

I made a batch of pasta dough with the following ingredients:

1 cup Semolina flour
2 cups Unbleached all purpose flour,
3 eggs,
1 teaspoon olive oil,
1 teaspoon salt.

Coloring:

1/2 of spinach puree
1/2 cup of pimento pepper puree

click for complete pasta making instructions

I made extra because I wasn’t sure how much I would need for stripes! The leftovers, I just cut into Linguine. After getting the dough into a rough ball I divided it in half. I kept one half plain and split the other half into two.

I steamed and pureed spinach and used it for ¼. Used the other quarter for the red dough, I pureed roasted pimento pepper (that was the only think I could think of that would be tasty and make it red!)

I kneaded the dough separately…adding the coloring into the red and green dough

I rolled out and cut a strip of red and green dough with the Fettucini cutter and let it hang for a few minutes

I rolled out a plain pasta strip to fit the ravioli pan. Then layed strips of the cut red and green pasta and pressed it down

Fed it through the Pasta Machine again and “Voila” you have stripes!!!! I LOVE making pasta!

To Fill and make Ravioli

I have this ravioli tray...but I still have to cut them by hand, but it's a good guide...Do not overfill. Add a top layer of Pasta and press all the edges together to seal. In this case I made a filling of Lobster/Crab/Ricotta and spices, but any good Ravioli filling is suitable.

I made these about 8 hours before I boiled them. I just covered them with plastic wrap and put them in the refrigerator. You can freeze them at this point though. Lay them individually on a floured sheet pan, cover and freeze and then take them off the pan and put them into a freezer bag for later usage.

Ummmm...If you look at the farthest ones I got a little confused and put the pasta upside down when laying the bottom layer into the pan! It should have been STRIPE SIDE DOWN!!!

This was the first time I ever made this recipe and I was getting a little nervous because I tend to over-fill. Not a problem though as everything just boiled up so well!

I served these ravioli's with a Smoked Salmon Cream Sauce Click for recipe

Cook these for about 10 minutes, add them to your sauce for about a minute. Serve and top with additional sauce.

Very Pretty and extremely tasty!

Enjoy!