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| Now you will add some Olive Oil. A very important ingredient! |
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| Now keep on working with the dough. It will be very crumbly at this point and you will say to yourself.. Man! Something is wrong with this dough, there is no way it's going to be a nice elastic ball. Patience.. Just keep working with it. |
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| ...Now add some water, this will make the dough wet, slimy and sticky all at the same time, don't worry about it, just keep working with the dough. |
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| At this point you will start to kneed the dough using some muscle. The dough will start to get more firm. Keep working it! You might want to put on some disco music at this point or something lively to keep you going!!! ;-) |
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| Work the dough some more. If the dough is still crumbly and it's not all sticking together smoothly you will need to add some more water. |
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| Add very little at a time, you don't want too much water, some times you just need drops more. |
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| Now it's time to really work hard. This is where you will do some classic dough kneading using the palm of your hand and your other hand on top of that hand giving you more strength as you push the dough down. |
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| Fold it over and push again. If you don't break a small sweat you are not working hard enough. You will be kneading this dough for about 15 - 20 minutes or so. |
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| This photo was taken after about 20 minutes of kneading. Hard work! This is the most important part to good tasting home-made pasta! You want to keep working with the pasta dough until you have a ball that is very smooth with few cracks. |
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| Well, here is a nice pasta dough ball ready to turn into some wonderful Ravioli!! YUM!!!! You can take a rest at this point and prepare your work area to start using the pasta machine for your Ravioli creation of YUM! |
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| You see here, I am very happy at this point because the dough came out just perfect! This is a perfect pasta dough ball! PERFECT! :-) With this ball of pasta dough I can make, Ravioli noodles as well as Lasagna, Fettucini, Spaghetti and even little puppy dogs if I want :-) |
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| Here you see I have prepared my work area to start working with the pasta. I have clamped my pasta machine onto the table where I can easily work with it. I have set down a nice clean cotton table cloth and there sits the pasta ball of joy ready to go! |
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| This is cool. These are the Italian instructions that came with the pasta machine. This is a very old machine and I am so grateful my mother in-law passed it on to my wife. |
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| You can see here that when you have finished preparing your dough ball you should have about 1-1/2" lbs. of pasta dough ready to go. I recommend you have one of these scales in your kitchen. They are very cheap and you can get them at Wal-Mart or any store like it. |
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| Here is the the Ricotta cheese being weighed to be sure I have the proper amount. I also have a nice large bowl to work with as well as the Parmesan cheese and fresh chopped parsley ready to go. You will being using Basil as well. |
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| In my opinion POLLY-O Ricotta Cheese is the best you can get and is the only thing I will use for my Raviolis and Lasagna, for that matter. |
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| Into the bowl goes the lovely Ricotta cheese. |
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Then the fresh parsley and Parmesan cheese. This is really some yummy filling!
Important note: Not shown in the photos is the (1) Egg that I added to this mix. Picture in your mind the egg falling into this bowl ;-) |
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