Yesterday I decided to again test the abilities of the KitchenAid pasta set by making my own ravioli. I don't have the ravioli maker attachment so I prepared for a fairly long and tedious process in order to have ravioli with chicken on the inside instead of the outside. As far as recipes go, everything was very simple. I used a basic pasta dough recipe, ricotta cheese, spinach and chicken. To top it we used some store-bought alfredo sauce with sauteed bell peppers.

The first mistake I made was in buying fresh spinach instead of frozen. On Wednesday when we made spinach pasta we used frozen spinach, but even after being thawed and squeezed it still retained enough moisture to make the dough very sticky. In hopes of avoiding that a second time I bought one 10oz bag of fresh spinach. Of course in order to use it for filling I had to trim all the stems, pulse it in a food processor and cook it in a skillet, all of which yielded exactly the same 10 oz of spinach as the frozen package with just as much moisture.

Once I dried the spinach, I mixed it with the ricotta cheese and some diced cooked chicken I had also pulsed in the food processor.
At this point Lauren joined the process and we rolled out some dough. Some very sticky and stretchy dough. But with some patience (and frustrated bickering) we managed to put together about 25 finished ravioli.

We had a ton of leftover filling, but by that point we were both so annoyed with process that we decided to refrigerate it and figure something else out. In my estimation there was enough extra filling to make another 30-40 ravioli.

Once we cooked the ravioli, we ended up losing about four ravioli to leaks and holes in the dough.

So to review, we started this process around 3:30pm. We finished at almost 6pm. And we netted 21 cooked ravioli.

This was so not worth it, regardless of the actual taste of the finished product. I blame the dough. It was too stretchy, which was probably my fault. This dough might have worked for cut noodles, but it was never going to work for ravioli.

In summary, with some refinement (and possibly the ravioli maker) in the assembly process homemade ravioli would be a worthwhile process if your plans were to eat a small portion (25 or less) and freeze the rest (50+) for easy meals later in the week. But at the moment for me it just isn't worth the effort.