2 years ago I dined at Osteria Francescana, currently rated the best restaurant in the world, and had the best Italian meal of my life. This week, I decided to make ravioli, a staple of Italian cuisine. They’re not related, I just wanted to brag.
For this dish, I opted to go without meat filling the bulk of the ingredients with mushrooms. Almost could have made this vegetarian, but I used chicken stock so too bad.
A mushroom cheese ravioli on a bed of coconut mushroom soup, served with a dollop of pesto, and sprinkled lemon zest.
As learned from xiaolongbaos last week, making dough from scratch is way too resource-intensive if I’m merely making a trivial Sunday dinner so this week I got lazy and opted for a more practical [time/money/energy/relationship]-saving solution: I bought thick pre-made dumpling skins from 99 ranch. Note: I didn’t take this picture below but this is essentially what I used.
For the mushroom filling, I used a mixture of fresh mushrooms and dried porcini mushrooms imported from Italy.
Porcini mushrooms are amazingly pungent and flavorful, and a perfect substitute for plebeian poor-tabella mushrooms in recipes whenever you move up in life.
They’re a bit pricey, but you can find them on Amazon so the next time your boyfriend makes you a mushroom dish and it’s not porcini… maybe you should also get a different funghi 😂😎.
Saute the mushrooms with some garlic, shallots, wine, parsley. Take it out, add some cheese (I used Ricotta, but Parmesean and other Italian sounding ones probably work just as well) and egg yolks, and mix.
Wrapping is done easily by sandwiching a ball of filling between two pre-made layers of wrap that you no longer have to expend blood, sweat, and tears to acquire. I beat an egg (yolk+whites) and brushed the mixture along the inside edges to seal the wraps together. A fork was pressed down against the edges to make the ravioli look more expensive than it really is.
After wrapping, I poached them in chicken stock with a little pinch (like half a bar) of butter.
Pesto was made fresh with basil, garlic, pine nuts, and olive oil. You just blend it together and add salt to taste. Below you will notice another trinket of domestication in use - the almighty Vitamix Blender.
Finally the mushroom soup was made by sautéing mushrooms in spices and whiskey, then mixing it in with the broth leftover from soaking dried porcini and chicken stock in a blender. After blending it all into a nice rich velvety soup, I added some coconut milk to create a less viscous consistency, and to add a tad of milky sweetness.
I really wanted to be bougie as fuck and add my favorite overpriced fresh/fair-trade/GMO-free/free-range Juice Served Here coconut drink instead of coconut milk, but unfortunately there seems to be a lack of overpaid millennials to gentrify my hometown of Cypress, CA (where I made this meal), so I had to settle for canned coconut milk. You could also just banausicly use regular cow milk if you’re aiming low.
Plated together.
Plated together attempt #2.
I need to get better at plating. As with life, a good personality only gets you so far.
Optionally you can fry some thinly cut mushrooms and decorate the dish with them but it was 10pm and my family was hungry so they preemptively ate my artwork.
