Cacio e pepe ravioli

Ricotta, you can sit this one out.

Welcome back to Pasta Sunday! This is the last instalment for the year and while it hasn’t been too long since I relaunched this publication, it has felt so wonderful being back. I hope you’re enjoying everything that’s come your way so far, and just to recap for anyone new here, I’ll link the last few recipes below.

Gnocchi with spinach and walnut pesto

An ode to vodka sauce

Carbonara di zucchine

The easiest confit tomato sauce with pappardelle

This is also just a note to everyone who has supported this publication either through a paid subscription or simply by reading, sharing and engaging with it. Your support means the world to me, and also enables me to keep cooking, writing and sharing recipes with you.

Also! Besides this delicious cacio e pepe number, there are a couple of more posts headed your way this year. We have the December round up en route, and paid subscribers can also expect a bonus recipe for my quick gigantes - one of my all time favourite Greek dishes! - too.

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Onto the recipe!

If you have been here for a while then you might have noticed a somewhat unplanned hiatus from stuffed pasta recipes. Perhaps it’s in part due to the time-poor nature of motherhood that steered me away from one of my favourite pastas to make, but I realised a couple of months ago that it has quite literally been an age since I shared a stuffed pasta recipe. I have since been reflecting - a lot, actually - about why I haven’t felt totally inspired to dip my toes into the pasta ripiena waters once more, and I came to realise that it had something to do with the monotony of a ricotta filling.

Now, do not get me wrong! I love a ricotta-filled pasta. In fact, I just spent a few days inhaling balanzoni in Bologna (a combo of ricotta and morty D which is just *chef’s kiss*), and if I see a classic spinach and ricotta ravioli on a menu you bet I am ordering it. But developing stuffed pasta recipes, trying to keep them easy to make, not too laborious and still creamy, cheesy and delightful - I felt ricotta was a repeat base that I just lost a little bit of interest in.

Then I bought myself a copy of the Tipo 00 cookbook (an amazing restaurant in Melbourne, if you aren’t familiar), which is a fabulous book to have in your arsenal for when you want to make pasta but also want to chef it up a little. I noticed the use of a béchamel base in a couple of Papadakis’ fillings and it just sort of created this explosion of ideas in my mind.

What if - I thought - I could make a cacio e pepe ravioli that actually tasted like cacio e pepe and not like… ricotta with pepper. While ricotta is a relatively mild cheese, its flavour is unmistakable. And from experience even when adding in other cheeses, you can’t mask the fact that ricotta still remains the base. Béchamel, on the other hand, is bland AF, to put it bluntly. Which makes it the perfect vessel for the iconic flavour combo of pecorino Romano and black pepper that I was after.

It also happens to have the most incredible texture for a filling - it’s smooth, it’s creamy, it quite literally melts in your mouth. It’s taking the concept of a béchamel croquette and applying it to pasta. Quite the experience, I have to say, although it did take a few tweaks to get just right - the filling must be thick enough to hold form, while still having the ability to relax again once the pasta is cooked.

With that all being said, it only felt right to end the year with a bang and bring you quite possibly one of my favourite stuffed pastas that I’ve developed to date. It also coincidentally is somewhat of a pantry pasta, if like me you consider pecorino Romano a pantry/fridge staple, of course.

The finished dish? Perfectly plump ravioli, filled with a cacio e pepe cream, served with my favourite butter sauce (a beurre monté), lemon thyme and a lil parmesan crisp for fun! All the details to follow 👇

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The Recipe

Yields approximated 25-30 ravioli - recipe can be scaled. Serves 4 as primi or 2 larger plates

Ingredients

For the pasta