The second run at pork and fennel ravioli. The first batch came out under-filled, four big parcels each when I wanted six or seven, and the pasta a touch thick so the middles stayed doughy. This version fixes the ratio, rolls the pasta properly thin, and lifts the brown butter with lemon and toasted hazelnuts, with roasted cherry tomatoes alongside for a sweet-sharp foil. The bones are the same as the first attempt; everything I learned the first time is baked in here.
Yield and time
- Makes: about 28 ravioli, serves 4 (six or seven each)
- Hands-on: 1.5 hours
- Total: 2.5 hours (including the 60-minute pasta dough rest and filling cool-down)
Ingredients
The filling
- 500g boneless pork shoulder (about 20% fat), to mince yourself
- 2 teaspoons fennel seeds
- 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
- ½ teaspoon dried chilli flakes
- 60ml dry white wine
- Zest of 1 lemon
- 60g parmesan, finely grated, plus extra for serving
- 1 large egg yolk
- 2 tablespoons fresh parsley, finely chopped
- Fine salt and black pepper
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
The pasta dough
- 300g “00” flour, plus extra for dusting
- 3 large eggs (about 60g each)
- 2 teaspoons olive oil
- ¼ teaspoon fine salt
To serve
- 80g unsalted butter
- 15-18 fresh sage leaves
- 50g blanched hazelnuts, roughly chopped
- Juice of ½ lemon (the one you zested for the filling)
- Extra parmesan
- Cracked black pepper
The roasted tomatoes
- 300g cherry tomatoes, on the vine
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- Flaky salt
You’ll need a mincer or a food processor for the pork, a stand mixer with a dough hook for the pasta, a pasta machine or a long rolling pin, a sharp knife or fluted pasta wheel, a ravioli cutter or a 6cm round biscuit cutter, a small baking tray for the tomatoes, two clean tea towels, and a slotted spoon for fishing the cooked ravioli out.
The filling, make it first
Toast the 2 teaspoons fennel seeds in a dry pan over medium heat for two to three minutes, swirling constantly, until you can smell them and they’ve turned a shade darker. Tip onto a board, cool a minute, then crush coarsely under the back of a knife. Get this done first, so the seasoning is ready to fold in between the two mincing passes.
First pass. Cut the 500g pork shoulder into 2-3cm chunks, fat and all, and spread them on a tray. Chill in the freezer for 20 minutes until the edges have firmed up; cold meat minces cleanly where warm meat smears and clogs the plate. Pass the chunks through the medium plate of a mincer, or pulse them through a food processor in two or three batches to a medium, even mince, stopping well before it turns to paste.
Season, then second pass. This is the reason for grinding your own. Scatter the crushed fennel, the 3 cloves chopped garlic, the ½ teaspoon chilli flakes, ¾ teaspoon fine salt and several grinds of black pepper over the mince and toss it loosely through with your hands. Now run the whole lot back through the mincer a second time (or pulse again). The second pass drives the seasoning right through the meat, so the fennel and garlic end up evenly distributed instead of sitting in pockets. Tip into a wide bowl, mix for a few seconds until the mince turns slightly tacky, then cover and rest in the fridge for 30 minutes (or up to overnight) so the flavours settle in.
Heat the 1 tablespoon olive oil in a large frying pan over medium-high. Add the seasoned mince in a thin layer and don’t break it up for the first three minutes; you want the underside to colour properly before the pan cools from stirring. Once the bottom is mahogany, break the pork into smaller pieces with a wooden spoon and keep cooking until it’s all caught some colour, about another five minutes. The garlic is already through the meat, so there’s nothing to add here.
Pour in the 60ml white wine. Scrape the brown bits off the bottom of the pan. Let the wine reduce to almost nothing, about ninety seconds.
Tip into a wide bowl to cool quickly. Stir occasionally as it cools; the filling needs to be cold before the egg yolk and parmesan go in.
Once cool, stir through the lemon zest (from 1 lemon), 60g parmesan, egg yolk (1 large), and 2 tablespoons parsley. Taste and adjust salt, remembering you already salted the raw mince. Refrigerate while you make the dough.
The dough
Put the 300g flour, 3 eggs, 2 teaspoons olive oil and ¼ teaspoon salt into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook. Mix on speed 2 until it comes together into a shaggy, rough mass; it’ll look dry and crumbly and won’t form a clean ball the way bread dough does, which is exactly right for pasta. Resist adding water unless it genuinely won’t cohere when you press a handful together.
Knead on speed 2 for five to six minutes. Keep it low; a stiff dough bounces around on higher speeds and overheats the motor, and if the machine starts to walk across the bench, stop and hold it. The dough is ready when it’s smooth, elastic, slightly tacky but not sticky; a quick minute finishing it by hand on the bench confirms it, but isn’t essential. Wrap tightly in cling film, rest at room temperature for 60 minutes.
Roll, fill, cut
Divide the dough into three pieces. Keep two wrapped while you work on the first.
Flatten the first piece into an oval. Run it through the pasta machine’s widest setting, fold in thirds like a letter, run through again, repeat three or four times. Then work down the settings, no folding from here, all the way to setting 7 or 8 (about 1mm, thin enough to see your hand through it). Don’t stop short at 5 or 6: a thick seam stays doughy, and the parcels cook unevenly, raw in the middle by the time the edges are done.
Lay the sheet on a lightly floured bench. Drop generous heaped teaspoons of filling (a good two teaspoons each) along the centre line, spaced 5cm apart. Brush the dough lightly with water between and around the mounds. Fold the sheet over the filling lengthwise, press out air around each mound with the side of your hand, working from the filling outwards (trapped air bursts the ravioli when boiled). Cut between mounds with a fluted wheel.
Lay each finished ravioli on a tea-towel-dusted-with-semolina tray. Don’t let them touch; they stick to each other if they do.
Repeat with the remaining two pieces of dough. You should land at around twenty-eight ravioli, six or seven per person.
Roast the tomatoes, toast the nuts
Heat the oven to 200°C. Sit the 300g cherry tomatoes, still on the vine, on a small baking tray. Trickle over the 1 tablespoon olive oil, scatter with flaky salt, and roast for 18-20 minutes, until the skins blister and split and the tomatoes slump but mostly hold their shape. Pull them out and leave to one side; warm rather than oven-hot is what you want on the plate.
Toast the 50g hazelnuts in a dry pan over medium heat for three to four minutes, tossing, until fragrant and patched darker. Tip onto a board, cool, then roughly chop. Keep them coarse: you want crunch, not dust.
Cook
Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a rolling boil. The brown butter sauce needs the ravioli straight out of the water, so start the sauce while the water’s coming up.
Melt the 80g butter in a wide pan over medium heat. Once foaming, add the 15-18 sage leaves. Keep swirling; the milk solids will go from white, to pale gold, to deep amber over about three minutes. Pull from the heat the moment the butter smells nutty and the sage leaves are crisp.
Cook the ravioli in two batches if your pot can’t take them all without crowding. Two to three minutes per batch now the pasta’s rolled thin. They float when they’re done.
Lift out with a slotted spoon, straight into the brown butter pan. Add a ladleful of pasta water and toss hard for a few seconds; the starch pulls the butter into a glossy emulsion that clings to the pasta instead of pooling as grease. Off the heat, squeeze in the juice of ½ lemon and scatter over most of the chopped hazelnuts.
Plate with the roasted tomatoes alongside, the last of the hazelnuts and extra grated parmesan over the top, a hard crack of black pepper. Eat immediately.
Freezing the spare ravioli
Lay raw ravioli on a parchment-lined tray, well-spaced, into the freezer for two hours. Once rock solid, transfer to a freezer bag. They cook from frozen, 5-6 minutes in the same boiling salted water.
Keeps three months in the freezer.