Bolognese ravioli

Instructions

1. For the filling: Put all the minced meat into your largest pan on a high heat with a good lug of oil and a pinch of sea salt and pepper. Cook for 20 minutes, or until golden, stirring regularly.
2. Meanwhile, peel and finely chop the garlic, onions, carrots and celery. When the mince has got a good colour, add all the chopped veg and cook for a further 10 minutes, then add the Chianti and cook it away. Pour in the tomatoes, breaking them up with a spoon, and add half a tin’s worth of water. Bring to the boil, then simmer gently for 1 hour, or until the meat is tender and the sauce is super-thick.
3. Remove from the heat to cool completely (refrigerate for 1-2 hours), then finely grate and stir in the Parmesan.
4. Meanwhile, to make the pasta dough: Pile the flour and semolina into a large bowl and make a well in the middle. Separate the eggs and add the yolks to the well, putting the egg whites into a sandwich bag and popping into the freezer for making meringues another day (e.g. in Jamie’s
   pavlova
   ).
5. Add the oil and ⅓ cup (60 ml) of cold water to the well, then use a fork to whip up with the eggs until smooth, then gradually bring the flour in from the outside. When it becomes too hard to mix, get your clean floured hands in there and bring it together into a ball of dough. Knead on a flour-dusted surface for around 4 minutes, or until smooth and elastic (eggs can vary in size and flour can vary in humidity; this dough shouldn’t be too wet or dry, but tweak with a touch more water or flour if you need to – use your common sense). Wrap in clingfilm and leave to relax for at least 30 minutes.
6. For the rolling out: Traditionally, Italians would have used a very large rolling pin, and you can do it that way if you like, it just requires a large flat surface and a bit of elbow grease. In this day and age, I think it’s fun and advisable to use a pasta machine. Attach it firmly to a nice clean table and divide your pasta dough into four pieces, covering everything with a damp, clean tea towel to stop it drying out as you go.
7. One at a time, flatten each piece of dough by hand and run it through the thickest setting, then take the rollers down two settings and run the dough through again to make it thinner. Importantly, fold it in half and run it back through the thickest setting again – I like to repeat this a few times because it makes the dough super-smooth and turns it from a tatty sheet into one that fills out the pasta machine properly.
8. Next, start rolling the sheet down through each setting, dusting with flour as you go. Turn the crank with one hand while the other maintains just a little tension to avoid any kinks, folds or ripples. Take it right down to the desired thickness, which is about 2 mm for shapes like linguine, tagliatelle and lasagne. For anything turned into a filled pasta such as ravioli and tortellini, go as thin as 1 mm, because when it’s folded around a filling it will double up to 2 mm.
9. After rolling out your dough to 1mm thick, cut your ravioli about 7 cm square (see Note). I work with a quarter of the pasta at a time to give more control. Use a heaped teaspoon of filling in the centre of each one, sealing the edges with a light brushing of water and pushing out the air – you should get about 50 to 60 ravioli from this amount of pasta. Place them on a semolina-dusted tray as you go. Freeze the remaining Bolognese (you’ll have roughly half left) for a rainy day, or make a double batch of pasta and freeze as ravioli – you can cook them from frozen in the sauce.
10. Put a pan of salted water onto boil for the pasta.
11. For the sauce, peel and roughly chop the garlic and de-seed and finely chop the chillies. Place a pan on a medium heat, add a lug of oil and the garlic and chilli, and fry for a few minutes, or until very lightly golden. Add the tomatoes and simmer for 10 minutes, or until thickened and reduced, then remove from the heat and blitz until smooth with a stick blender. Taste and season to perfection, then place back on a very low heat.
12. Cook the ravioli in the boiling salted water for 3 minutes, or until tender, then use a slotted spoon to transfer them to the sauce. Gently toss together and simmer for another couple of minutes, then divide between warm bowls, scatter with baby basil leaves and serve with a few extra gratings of Parmesan, if you like.

• This recipe makes more Bolognese ragu than needed for the ravioli. It can be frozen for use another time.
• Instead of making your own pasta dough, you could use 800 g of fresh pasta sheets.
• In
  Jamie's Comfort Food
  , the TV series, Jamie and Gennaro make the ravioli by placing balls of filling about 5 cm apart along one side of a length of rolled pasta dough, then flipping the other side over the top. The long side is sealed, and then individual ravioli formed using the hands and fingers. A fluted pasta wheel is then used to cut the sides of each raviolo.