Giant Ravioli ~ Ravioloni Valle Scannese

I dislike big food. It’s a turnoff to me. I have no desire to be supersized or doubled-down, and I refuse to let my kids partake of food that’s defined more by volume than flavor. You won’t find any of us chowing down on a bucket of popcorn at the movie theater or slurping a Big Gulp or a venti or trenta or quaranta or however many ounces we’ve worked our way up to these days.

Yet, somehow, I managed to fall in love with a giant raviolo.

In my defense, I was in Italy, where it’s possible to fall in love with anything from a lone umbrella pine perched on a hillside to the 95-year-old toothless contadina who sells perfect baby zucchini with the blossoms still attached. At the time, I happened to be in a place of rugged, unspoiled beauty: an organic caseficio (cheese farm) in Abruzzo.

The cheese maker, a large man named Gregorio Rotolo, who’s as renowned for his distinctive sheep’s milk cheeses as he is for the black woolen beanie he perpetually sports, gave my husband, my kids, and me a tour of the place and a taste of his warm ricotta, made just that morning and still draining in baskets. For a minute I thought maybe the Rapture really had come and I’d been called up. But then I opened my eyes and spied tables in the room adjacent to the cheese shop. Turns out the farm also runs a family-style restaurant. My husband and I looked at each other. We weren’t going anywhere for at least a couple of hours. The kids rolled their eyes in resignation.

Listed casually on the menu was Raviolone. Big raviolo. Big deal. More like big gimmick, I thought. We almost didn’t order it, but my curiosity kicked in. I was, after all, writing a book on the pastas of Italy. I was expecting a plate of oversized half-moons, each maybe the size of an espresso saucer. But what arrived on a platter put my imagination to shame. It was, indeed, one raviolo, as written on the menu. A single raviolo that was nearly a foot long. As big as a bistecca or a pounded veal cutlet. It was shaped like a perfect half-moon, with a fluted border, and dressed simply, with just a little tomato sauce and a shower of cheese. It was filled with the farm’s same fresh ricotta we’d just swooned over.

The four of us marveled at it; then we divided and devoured it. The pasta was silky and tender and the ricotta filling fresh and sweet. It was outrageous and yet, at the same time, understated. It seemed, suddenly, the most natural thing to find on the menu at this restaurant tucked in these hills. Of course there existed such a wonderful form of ravioli. This was Italy.

I knew right then at the table that I’d try to re-create this marvel at home. But it wasn’t until I got back to my kitchen in Virginia that I actually considered the logistics. How in the world would I assemble such a large raviolo? How much filling would I need? How would I boil it? And once it was cooked, how would I get it out of the water in one piece?

I wish, for dramatic effect, that I could tell you it took a heroic effort on my part to master this pasta project, that I went through batch after batch of dough and tubs of ricotta, that there was failure and frustration before there was success.

But the truth is, instead of being ridiculously difficult, it was almost easy. Okay, maybe it was a little unwieldy the first one or two times, but definitely not the daunting task that I’d anticipated. Getting the thing out of the pot proved to be the biggest challenge, and even that can be accomplished with relative ease thanks to a very large skimmer.

When I cook ravioloni for my family, as I often do, I make one for each of us. It sounds downright…piggish. But when you consider that a pound of pasta dough yields just enough to make four ravioloni, it’s really no different than if I made lots of small ravioli or just cooked a pound of dried pasta.

Plus, no matter how crazy or cruddy the day has been, somehow sitting down to a dinner of giant ravioli has a way of transporting us from our everyday lives in suburban northern Virginia right back to Abruzzo—and my realization that, yes, sometimes bigger is better.–Domenica Marchetti