The Easiest Way To Test The Doneness Of Ravioli Without Ruining One

Making ravioli from scratch may not be all that difficult. Sure, it's a dedicated kitchen project, but if you approach it with confidence, you're more likely to enjoy the process as a culinary adventure instead of a chore. The components are simple — fresh pasta dough, a way of rolling it out, some well-seasoned filling, a little dexterity, and a fun mold or pasta slicer that gives you the spiked sides of a classic ravioli.

Once you've got them stuffed, shaped, and sealed, you can take a few different directions with your ravioli. You could store them in plastic bags and freeze them, where they'll keep for up to two months. Or, you could just cook them right away. However, cooking ravioli and testing to see if they're done can be trickier than actually assembling the pasta. 

Provided they're sealed properly, you won't have to worry about them falling apart in boiling water. But when it comes to testing if they're ready to eat, you can't really do a poke test the way you would on a hamburger or steak. You could take one piece out and slice it in half, but you'd be ruining a perfectly good ravioli. There is, however, an easier trick to testing doneness that does not involve completely eviscerating a ravioli. 

As ravioli are made using fresh pasta, their cooking time will not be as long as a box of dried linguine. Cooking fresh pasta really only takes a maximum of four minutes, even if it's filled. Understanding cooking timeframes is only one component of cooking fresh pasta, however. Truly knowing when the ravioli is done is a matter of testing to see if the pasta is cooked. 

Here's how you'll test your ravioli. Remove one ravioli from the water and place it gently on a cutting board using a slotted spoon or one of those spider-web style skimmers. Trim a piece of pasta off the edge of the ravioli using a knife, being sure not to penetrate the center, which would allow any filling to escape. Check the taste and texture of the trimmed piece. If it is warmed through and chewy, the pasta is done cooking. 

In the end, you'll have one awkwardly shaped ravioli, but that's better than having a ruined one that needed more time to cook. If you're a stickler for uniformity in presentation, set the trimmed ravioli aside and enjoy it as a special treat for your efforts. It's a nice little reward for putting in the hard work — especially since they are ravioli, the whole batch will be gone in about five minutes.