Ravioli all’Amatriciana – Tuscan Chef shares Recipe

A visit to SaQua in Montescudaio (Tuscany) to watch chef Simone Acquarelli prepare Ravioli all’Amatriciana –

Ready? – Ready! We are going to prepare the pork cheek for our Ravioli We use tomato sauce, pork cheek Basil and garlic, just for the filling So we cut the pork cheek Into really small pieces In a cold pot Extra-virgen olive oil Now we prepare the garlic and our herbs

We just crash a part of the garlic And the other one we chop Just a small amount of garlic Our pork cheek is ready We use our fat and extra-virgin olive oil To cook our tomatoes First the chopped garlic and the whole garlic We heat it up a little bit

The oil is already hot, so 10 or 15 seconds is ok And we put our tomatoes We need at least 10 or 15 minutes For the moment we don’t put any salt, because our pork cheek is really salty So let’s check it later

While it is still a little bit cold, we put some basil leaves Small pieces We cook it really slow And cover it For Amatriciana we usually don’t use basil But I love tomatoes with basil so I like to use it Now we are going to prepare our pasta

I prefer to use the machine just because it is easy We use 100g of Semolina Flour 400g of 80 flour I like to use 3 whole eggs And then 80g of pasteurized egg yolk It goes into the machine I need just a pinch of salt that I can not find

The pinch of salt Now we wait a few minutes until the pasta is ready We have to check because sometimes we need more egg yolk Our pasta is ready It’s perfect We put it plastic wrap And put it in the fridge for half an hour Our tomatoes are almost cooked

This is just corn starch To fix it a little bit, otherwise it is too soft water We put our pork cheek back We cook it all together with the tomatoes It smells good We spread it out and keep it in the fridge until it is cold The next step

We are going to cut our Pecorino The Amatriciana is made it Pecorino Romano But here we are in Tuscany so we use Pecorino We put it on the side Now we cut tiny slices of pork cheek We leave it on the side And we put it on top of the Ravioli

Just before we serve them It should be like this We will check if our pasta is ready Yes, it is ready We just take the part we need And the other part we keep in the plastic wrap Ok, we start Little by little

Now we have to wait 5 minutes and then we start again We will finish the last step for our Ravioli 5 minutes, we will start again Our pasta is ready Now it is cold We have to check if it is salted enough or not Just a pinch of salt We finish the Ravioli

We start from one side to the other one So we have the possibility to take out all the air from inside We can re-use this pasta so we don’t through it away And close our Ravioli Some Semolina flour on the tray Now we are going to cooking our Ravioli and plate it

And we cook… 3 or 4 minutes and it’s ready Ok, our favortelli are ready I think. I have to check. Yes. We are going to plate it Our Pecorino Black pepper And some thyme Our Ravioli are ready to be eaten