What’s bright green and ridiculously delicious?
A recipe for green lemon ricotta ravioli and a proper butter sauce
no. 5
Green Lemon Ricotta Ravioli and a Proper Butter Sauce (Beurre Monté)
We are back for the fifth instalment of Pasta Sunday! I’ve had this recipe ready to go for a couple of weeks now, and I have been dying to share it with you. This week we’re making a classic ravioli in a sage and butter sauce, but not just any butter sauce. This sauce is called a beurre monté and it is my favourite way to serve stuffed pasta, accompanied with a *chef’s kiss*, of course.
Beurre monté screams peak French cuisine, which in my opinion makes everything sound really fancy, or fancier than it is. In reality, it’s a humble butter sauce, but one where the butter remains emulsified (i.e. totally homogenous and not split), and can remain this way even at high temperatures. The name beurre monté can refer to both the sauce itself, or the method of preparation. Just to hype this sauce up a bit more, Thomas Keller aka the legendary chef behind French Laundry once described beurre monté as the workhorse sauce of the kitchen. Now if that doesn’t convince you to come on this butter journey with me, I don’t know what will.
I love adding vegetable purée to pasta dough to impart a pop of colour and subtle flavour, too. I have a particular love of green pasta (which feels the least artificial in appearance to me), so a bright and vibrant bunch of cavolo nero (or Tuscan kale) was used in the making of this dough. A little bit of the purée is also reserved to be stirred through the ricotta filling, which is spiked with black pepper a plenty and lemon zest. It sings.
Suggested Wine Pairing
A fresh and acidic white wine is the order of the day to match the lemon notes in this pasta, and cut through the richness of the sauce. I don’t know if this is exposing myself too much, but at heart I truly am a savvy B kind of girl. And did you know that Australia is up there with some of the most famous producers of SB?
Sticking with an Aussie producer for today’s recommendation, I absolutely love everything that comes out of Bird in Hand’s barrels, and their classic Sauvignon Blanc is an easy to drink and beautiful drop that I think works especially well here thanks to its bright citrus and honey flavours and fresh finish.
Sunday Soundtrack
Everything I’ve been listening to this week, throw it on and get kneading.