Ravioli Dreaming
Jul. 30th, 2009 02:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleToday's work:
The process continues to improve. This time, I got the mixing very clean and messed up hardly any cookware. The pasta process in particular is a lot better - by mixing the eggs and flour roughly in a mixing bowl before putting it in the cuisinart, the food processor bowl comes out almost completely clean between batches. Also got the moisture level perfect the first time on every batch, which is a huge time saver.
Each lump of dough is a bit more than 1 pound, the fillings about 2.5 lb. each. Hardly any waste this time, just a few little scraps of pasta and a few tablespoons of filling.
Still, you're looking at eight hours of work. The fillings take a couple of hours - breaking down the squash (difficult and somewhat dangerous work), grilling the mushrooms, blanching the spinach, and blending it all up takes way longer than it seems it ought to. Then an hour to get the dough into balls like this. The next three hours are spent on rolling and shaping, then add a couple of hours of packaging, cleaning, and futzing around. The material cost is about $3/lb and I get paid $9 by the shop - $12 an hour, woo hoo! My earlier estimates of hourly profit were kinda unrealistic. But still, it's been excellent marketing for the business.
Japanese pasta methods, especially soba, have been very inspiring. It no longer seems at all odd to me that soba school would take a whole month to complete. There is no end to the obsessiveness, and no end to the benefits of that obsession. Every motion must be finely tuned - literally every gesture is significant, because if you do ANYTHING wrong, it's a train wreck that sucks up endless time.
This batch was nearly perfect, requiring no correction at any stage. I tried a four-wide layout during shaping instead of my usual two-wide, but that didn't work well so I had to go back to the slower method. The fillings were a bit too moist but they still worked OK. There's still room for improvement, but it's getting close to optimal for this method.
Maybe this sounds boring but I think it's one of the most interesting things I've ever done. I'd love to be a cranky old pasta master someday, whacking idiot disciples over the head with a stick. Any takers? [grin]
The process continues to improve. This time, I got the mixing very clean and messed up hardly any cookware. The pasta process in particular is a lot better - by mixing the eggs and flour roughly in a mixing bowl before putting it in the cuisinart, the food processor bowl comes out almost completely clean between batches. Also got the moisture level perfect the first time on every batch, which is a huge time saver.
Each lump of dough is a bit more than 1 pound, the fillings about 2.5 lb. each. Hardly any waste this time, just a few little scraps of pasta and a few tablespoons of filling.
Still, you're looking at eight hours of work. The fillings take a couple of hours - breaking down the squash (difficult and somewhat dangerous work), grilling the mushrooms, blanching the spinach, and blending it all up takes way longer than it seems it ought to. Then an hour to get the dough into balls like this. The next three hours are spent on rolling and shaping, then add a couple of hours of packaging, cleaning, and futzing around. The material cost is about $3/lb and I get paid $9 by the shop - $12 an hour, woo hoo! My earlier estimates of hourly profit were kinda unrealistic. But still, it's been excellent marketing for the business.
Japanese pasta methods, especially soba, have been very inspiring. It no longer seems at all odd to me that soba school would take a whole month to complete. There is no end to the obsessiveness, and no end to the benefits of that obsession. Every motion must be finely tuned - literally every gesture is significant, because if you do ANYTHING wrong, it's a train wreck that sucks up endless time.
This batch was nearly perfect, requiring no correction at any stage. I tried a four-wide layout during shaping instead of my usual two-wide, but that didn't work well so I had to go back to the slower method. The fillings were a bit too moist but they still worked OK. There's still room for improvement, but it's getting close to optimal for this method.
Maybe this sounds boring but I think it's one of the most interesting things I've ever done. I'd love to be a cranky old pasta master someday, whacking idiot disciples over the head with a stick. Any takers? [grin]
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Date: 2009-07-30 10:39 pm (UTC)Cooking with combinatorics - Yumm!
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Date: 2009-07-31 12:31 am (UTC)