I love ravioli. It’s been my favorite pasta since I was a kid. Indeed, it was the only pasta I liked as a kid. This love comes from the fact that my grandparents used to make homemade ravioli, and they celebrated my first birthday with a raviolada, I love seeing the photos of my with a face full of sauce.
Short of having my grandmother make ravioli, I only had ravioli growing up when my father would buy the fresh pasta at a nearby pasta factory. But it was expensive. My parents were thrifty, so it was a special occurrence.
In the US (and in Argentina nowadays), you could get frozen ravioli for a reasonable price, so they were one of the first dishes I started “making” after I got married. I still always keep a bag of frozen ravioli in the fridge just in case.
With time, supermarkets started selling higher quality refrigerated ravioli, and recently Rana has moved into selling these “gourmet”-style ravioli, with unusual/special fillings. They were on sale this week ($5 for the 8 oz package, down from $8 regular price), so I grabbed a couple of bags.
I hadn’t had the pulled pork ravioli before and I was sort of puzzled by them – I still am. The pulled pork filling is very tasty, it has a strong, but balanced, BBQ pork flavor and stands well to the pasta. The flavor of fillings in ravioli often gets lost, but that is not the case here. Still, it was not clear to me why I was eating pulled pork inside a ravioli. The flavor/texture combination wasn’t really obvious and I’m still not sure that it worked. Again, it was tasty but it was weird.
I usually eat commercial ravioli with store-bought pasta sauce, but I didn’t think the flavor combinations would work here, so I tried these ravioli with butter – that worked well enough. I think brown butter and sage would work as well, though I was too lazy to make it last night. I did try it with some grated pecorino cheese, but the cheese does nothing here but confuse flavors – it’s definitely best left out. You do need butter or sauce as otherwise the ravioli get too sticky/gummy.
The other issue I have with these ravioli is the package size. The 8 oz package is supposed to offer two servings of one cup each. But unless you are serving them as an appetizer or along other dishes, or simply are not very hungry, a cup of ravioli is too little. Two cups, however, is too much unless you are actually very hungry. Now, the package might be perfect if you are making dinner for yourself and a young child, but that’s no longer my case. I wish they would increase the size to 12 oz, or perhaps decrease it to 6 oz. That said, $5 for a gourmet tasting meal is definitely not a bad price.
The ravioli themselves are pretty large – the kind you need to cut in two in order to fit into your mind. Obviously you can do this with a fork, but I personally prefer smaller ravioli.
I might buy these again to feed to my husband, who just loves pulled pork. But really, I wish Rana would just sell their pulled pork to eat in a sandwich, that feels more natural.
Recent Comments