Lately, I've been helping out at work forming Veal Sweetbread Ravioli. Oddly enough, while most people find repetitive tasks annoying and tedious, I find it rather therapeutic. I love making these perfect little mounds of deliciousness. Then again, I don't do it very often - only about an hour a week. Obviously I would be telling a different story if pasta-making consumed an 8-hour work day.
As you may have picked up in the previous paragraph, I've only been helping in the "forming" process. The Executive Sous Chef Kei makes the dough and filling. I love the yellow hue of the dough from the egg yolks - it gives the pasta an authentic and homemade look. The filling is a mixture of chopped fried veal sweetbread, ricotta and parsley. Because the sweetbread is fried first, the ravioli has an unexpected yet incredibly tasty "toasty" flavor. After these components are made, we set up an assembly line of sorts and complete the forming process. With a few tricks that I picked up on at my previous job in a restaurant serving Italian cuisine, I must say that we've become pretty fast at this!
Each order gets 3 ravioli and each batch yields about 50 servings. They freeze really well on a flat sheet pan and can be cooked directly from the freezer or defrosted from the refrigerator.
Here's Chef de Cuisine Daniel Corey's finished product...
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| photo by Donna Davis |
Crispy Sweetbread // Summer Truffle
Duck Jus // Truffle Emulsion
Teamwork at its best!
