tru-ly yolky

i’m addicted to cookbooks. I blame amazon and their one-click purchasing mechanism. gone are the days where the process of having to manually input the credit card details which gave time for pause and to soberly consider carefully the absolute necessity of one’s potential (and usually frivolous) purchase.

so I found myself having purchased rick tramonto’s cookbook based on his restaurant, Tru without having thought clearly if I needed yet another cookbook. it’s a lovely cookbook – the right balance between recipes, background text and pictures. it got delivered to me at slavedrivers inc. and I tore into it, heading straight to rick’s recipe of the egg yolk ravioli. I’ve been meaning to do one of these for a long time, stopped only by inertia and laziness of having to unearth the pasta maker from the back of the cabinet. having also recently watched an episode of market kitchen where a version thereof was being made – my confidence was bolstered. LL was coming over for dinner and to say goodbye – my one last time to experiment on her before she left London.

and because I was disorganized and didn’t have half the things that tramonto called for (including a pre-made mushroom veloute and NO2 chargers for my iSi whip maker), I came up with my own version thereof. I did however follow (roughly speaking) his proportions for the pasta dough. rolling these out on the next to last setting on the pasta maker, I cut out large squares of pasta which were then lightly dusted with flour. I sat on these squares a mound of blanched, drained and finely chopped spinach into which I had mixed a generous portion of boursin and lots of seasoning to taste. on this mound, I sat an egg yolk - a free range and very fresh egg yolk of course. a second square of pasta was draped over these egg yolk mounds, taking care to expel the air as I sealed the edges. cutting off the excess pasta dough, the raviolis were quickly cooked in briskly boiling water, drained, and dressed with a little butter, salt and pepper, and a quick shaving of pecorino.

I can’t say they were even half as good as Tramonto’s version, but the whole concept of the egg yolk oozing out and self saucing the thin pasta sheets definitely got LL’s approval. I’m going to get my act together and properly make Tramonto’s version with all his quail egg, mushroom veloute and cep foam business.