Cheese Ravioli with Carbonara Sauce

Today, I’m going to be preparing for you Ravioli’s with Carbonara sauce. Carbonara is basically the use of bacon and onions, a little bit of cream, add a little and a little bit of butter and that goes right over the pasta. It's a great item, wonderful flavor. It's good if the kids were on vacation, they’re on holiday and you want to entertain them really nicely. It's a dish that I would make with my kids all the time and it's a wonderful item and great flavor. Who doesn’t love bacon and onions and all that stuff.

I’ve got some cheese Raviolis. We’ve gt it in this pot coking right over here. We’ve got to render a little bit of bacon. Now, when you render bacon, you want to put a little bit of butter in the process or little oil just to get it started. So, it doesn’t burn then the fat from the bacon will do what it means to do.

So, let’s go and we’ll get this cooked up nicely and while that’s going, we’d diced up some onions. Now when you dice onions, I pretty much dice it like this, cut underneath it, it comes out just right. It's really easy. Do you see a nice small fine when they come out?

It was going to going to burn me, for one if I pull it out and put it on a board and so I cooked them first. We’ll cut them first and I put them in there then it makes it just one process instead of two. Now, if I was not using television, then you could cook it first and then put it to be able to pull me that is. I want also the fat from the bacon. That’s a huge part of the dish, just to get the fat from the bacon. So we’d cut it and then render it and then we’ll put our onions inside there to get it going. The tip of my fingers has been gone for the years so I keep on doing this. Put that to the side, put oil on them so they won’t stick and that’s ready.

Now we cover in our sauce to get the bacon nice and almost rendered out. You put your onions in there, mix it up nicely, get them nice and translucent and cut some onions and put them in there. I like green onions, gives it a great flavor. Now, after those are nice and cooked up, we’re going to add a little bit of stock to it and a little bit of a cream. Most of the time, you add just cream. I’m going to add a little bit of stock, a little bit of cream to it.

When you’re adding heavy cream to any dish, it is very important. It's okay to add it. When you’re using half enough, it's a little bit different because the butter fat is less and there’s a lot more fat than a heavy cream. So as I spoke about earlier, it's important to temper when you put it or when you’re applying creams or milk to your dish, a little stock.

Add the cream I’m going to have because it's a little bit heavier and it won’t hurt it. The buttermilk, the half and half, it's a little bit different. We’re going to take some of the hot stock and put it with it first. So, both temperatures are pretty much adjusted and it doesn’t break on me. Now, when I use bacon, Parmesan cheese, I used very little salt because both ingredients carry a lot of salt already. So, I stay away from the salt and you just let it reduce a bit. We’re going to add some cheese to it. The cheese will bring the flavor up a little bit. We’re going to add a little bit of butter back to it.

This is about four ounces. There’s a pan in the package, I’ll add about four ounces right now. Someone is asking about butter early. They’re salted butter, they are wheat butter. They are unsalted butter and it pretty much tells you, if there’s salt added or salt not added to it. Sweet butter doesn’t have any salt and it is just the cream that is turn to get you the butter.

There are a lot of imitation butters where they’re not really butter. They don’t have anything that are butter components with the exception of the flavor when you take oil and they whipped them with water and seasoning and it go through what they call the process of iodinization, when you whip something at a certain RPM, it fuses it together. So that’s what they basically do when you take butter and the water and the seasoning or oil does the same thing or if you’re making mayonnaise, it's a similar process where you take two unlike items and just kind of put them together. So, you have a lot of that out there.

Now, you let this reduce for a bit. It should lightly thicken. The cheese will also help with the process to get the flavor you’re looking for. If you don’t have cream, you can always start when you first saute the bacon off, you can add a little bit of flour before you add your milk to it or F&F and the process is basically what you do when you’re making roux in the pan. So you could use a little roux just to get it to the thickness that you’re looking for. If not, just let the creamer use itself, we’ll add the cheese, add your butter, add your flavor, don’t do that, that’s not good but it should give you the right doneness that you’re looking for.

No, at this point in time, I know exactly where that is. I’m going to put this to the side and we’re going to put our Raviolis right in there. I probably use about half of them. We’ll let them cook the starch from the Ravioli. It will also absorb some of the milk and some of the cream and they’ll thicken up even more.

Now, when you’re making Carbonara, it's always good to have some course growing black pepper to it, the essential part of the dish. So we’ll put some black pepper in there and turn that off, mix it in a little bit and we are complete.

Italian food is fun to make because you have a northern Italian with this dish. They should be more of northern Italian and you have Southern Italian and you also have Sardinia. You have the Mediterranean. You have all those areas even France. They’re all borderline countries and they use a lot of the same ingredients. Sicily and all those areas, Sicily and the food is a little bit more spicy because of the heritage of the people who live there.

Okay, that right there is just about done. A little cheese, nice basil leaf on there and call it a day, Ravioli Carbonara