Ramsoms & Ricotta Ravioli Recipe (aka cheesy, spicy wild garlic ravioli)
Usually when I post recipes, they’re either long-time firm favourites or new things that I’ve made a least a few times to try different flavour tweaks. However these suckers took a good while to make and I can’t see myself finding the time to make them again before the wild garlic (Ramsoms) season is well and truly over, so I’m going to publish the recipe now after making them start-to-finish just once. They were yummy as they were :)
There is so much wild garlic in the woods behind our house that it seems rude not to use it as often as possible throughout the spring. We add it raw into salad, have it in mash/potato cakes for a colcannon-ish dish, use it as a pizza topping but mostly, have it on pasta — usually wilted with a little lightly fried chorizo and some olives. Yummo.
It goes so well with pasta, as a tasty spinach substitute, that I wanted to try making pasta with it – and this is the result: wild garlic ravioli. WG loses a lot of its fieriness when you cook it and the flavour here is quite subtle – which is why I served it with a sprinkling wild garlic seed pods too. Plus, they also look ace :)
Ramsoms & Ricotta Ravioli Recipe
(Yes, I like alliteration.)
Makes: 3 decent sized portions if that’s all you’re having; or 4 portions with meat/veg
For the pasta
225g of 00 grade pasta flour
2 large eggs
80-100g of wild garlic
pinch of salt
extra (plain or pasta) flour for dusting
For the filling
225g of ricotta
25g of parmasan
1/4 to 1/2 tsp of ground black pepper
1/2 tsp of ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp of chilli flakes
Finely chopped basil & oregano leaves (or about 1tsp of dried herbs)
To serve
About 2tsbps of wild garlic seed pods (about half a dozen flower heads)
olive oil
a knob of butter (optional)
Wild garlic and serrano ham pizza – mmm!
We had wild garlic and serrano ham pizza for dinner last night. Our friend Strowger has repeatedly advocated wild garlic seed pods on pizza after we both pickled some last year but I hadn’t used the leafy stuff on pizza before.
I won’t do a full recipe – since I would have thought just about everyone reading this will have their own preferred dough & sauce recipe – but I will say I collected a large handful of wild garlic (Ramsons) leaves, which weighed about 50g including stalks – although I didn’t actually use any of the stalks on the pizza — they got sliced off and nibbled while I was cooking :)
I sliced the washed leaves into ribbons and wilted them slightly by frying them very lightly (30 seconds or so) in a drop of oil to mellow the flavour slightly, then immediately put them onto my prepared pizza. I paired it with serrano ham since that’s got enough flavour to hold its own against the WG – and added some flowers afterwards for prettification purposes ;)
And the verdict: well, the short version of thoughts is in the title for this post ;) John said it didn’t taste like any pizza he’d ever had before – but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I thought the wilted texture was perfect – very soft without being slippery – and the flavour more developed than the sharpness of raw wild garlic.
Next time, I’m almost tempted to leave off the ham though (it was still there but not the star of the show) and just have some different cheese and perhaps some ricotta or sliced mozzaralla – basically a more intensely flavoured spinach-and-ricotta style pie.
Read MoreMore experiments with wild garlic seed pods
After the pickling success a few weeks ago, I wanted to find other ways to use wild garlic seed pods for the year.
Experiment 1: Mint and wild garlic seed pods pesto
*Everyone* makes pesto from wild garlic leaves so I decided to give it a go with the pods and mint leaves. (After the pickling, I, randomly, went to clean my teeth and noticed that the lingering smell of that chivey garlic on my hands mingled wonderfully with my Sensodyne – and I wondered if that wasn’t a perfect jumping off point for my George’s Marvellous Pesto experiments. As luck would have it, our mint has gone mad this year so I had a lot of leaves to work with.)
The seed pods have a much lower water content than leaves so when blasted together, it was very dry and needed quite a bit of olive oil to make it ooze. Although it’s supposed to be pretty decent oil, the stuff I used added an unpleasant note to the paste – even over the super super strong flavour of the garlic and the mint. All in all, it was a bit overwhelming.
Verdict: Fail.
Read MorePickling wild garlic (Ramsons) seed pods
I love wild garlic. It was the first wild food I really tried and the one I’m still most comfortable with given how easily identifiable it is, and how it makes the world green when everything else is still hitting the snooze alarm after winter.
Usefully, the woods next to our house are *filled* with it, more than anywhere else I’ve seen – we’ve even got a sizeable patch growing at the bottom of our garden, which made it very easy to forage for a few handfuls of leaves at a time when I wanted to fling them in a recipe. Unfortunately though, like when you have most things in abundance, you don’t think about the time when they’re not going to be there any more – and I didn’t think about preserving any leaves until it was pretty much too late.
I’ve got a baggie full of stems in the freezer though – for using like spring onions in stir frys – and I was already thinking about how to preserve some seed pods when ManUpATree Nick Weston published a post on pod pickling. Very convenient timing!
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