Adele’s gattafin (fried ravioli from Levanto)

Instructions

1. To make the pasta dough, tip the flour and salt onto a pasta board and make a generous well in the middle. Mix together the olive oil, white wine and water and pour into the flour. Using a fork, slowly draw in a bit of flour at a time, making sure there’s a consistently smooth mixture with no flour-bergs. Eventually you’ll end up with a bit of a shaggy mess which you should heap together; start working this dough into a ball. Knead it for 10 minutes, then leave it to rest, covered, for 30 minutes. Incidentally, Adele says this dough makes excellent tagliatelle; she is particularly fond of serving it with a game-bird ragù.
2. While the pasta rests, prepare the greens for the filling. Wash the trimmed leaves in plenty of cold water; this is especially important if you’ve collected them from your garden or the countryside.
3. Bring a pan of salted water to the boil and add the greens. Cook the leaves until they are collapsed and tender – how long this takes will depend on your selection.
4. Heat the olive oil in a frying pan over a medium heat, then add the onions and sauté with a pinch of salt for 7-10 minutes until soft. Don’t let them go brown.
5. Add the greens to the onions and fry the mixture for several more minutes until it starts to dry out but remains moist enough to squish together and form into balls. Season the mixture generously with salt and some nutmeg and leave it to cool in a bowl.
6. When it is cold enough to work with your hands, add the egg, both cheeses, the parsley and the marjoram. Squish everything together. If the filling feels wet and sloppy, add a handful of breadcrumbs and let the filling sit for 10 minutes to allow the breadcrumbs to absorb the moisture.
7. Roll out the pasta dough to a thickness of 1 mm. If this is a bit tricky for you to achieve by hand, then a pasta machine is fine.
8. Use a 10 cm (4 in) pastry cutter or upside-down glass to cut out pasta discs by pressing firmly through the dough – you will end up with about 40 discs. Try and do this in an orderly fashion so the circles are all close together; that way you don’t waste dough. Scoop a walnut-sized portion of filling and place it on the top half of each pasta disc. You’re going to fold the bottom half over the top, but first use a spray bottle of water and finely mist each pasta round, holding the bottle at least a 30 cm (12 in) above it so the dough won’t become too wet. This will help the dough to seal well; its oil content can hinder it from being sticky.
9. Fold the half of pasta which doesn’t have filling over the top to form a half moon shape. Pinch and press the edges together really well. Pat each gattafin gently to flatten it slightly – this helps to flip them when you are frying them.
10. Take a deep-sided sauté pan and pour in neutral oil to a depth of about 5 cm. Heat it to 180°C. Adele uses a wooden skewer to test the temperature of the oil: she dips it into the oil and when bubbles form around the wood, the oil is hot enough. Fry just a few gattafin at a time – there needs to enough space and plenty of oil around them for even cooking. The gattafin cook quickly, so flip them frequently until they are lovely and golden (this will take 2–3 minutes). Use a spider to scoop them out and plonk them on kitchen paper or brown paper to drain the excess oil.
11. Sprinkle them with salt and watch them disappear as fast as you can make them.