Ravioli is typically stuffed with cheese, but many recipes offer chefs a chance to experiment with flavors and textures in the dough and filling. Despite being a bit time-consuming, making your own ravioli is not as difficult as you might think, but if you want to add some meat to your filling, you need to be careful about the kind you choose.

Many ravioli recipes include Italian sausage, seasoned ground beef, or pork, and usually call for cooking the meat before adding it to the filling. Skipping the precooking and adding raw meat to your filling might seem risky, but it can actually be perfectly safe, so long as you take some extra steps to make sure you cook the ravioli properly.

The CDC and USDA recommend that consumers cook ground meat to 160 degrees, and boiling meat-filled ravioli brings the meat to that temperature, but you'll want to double check by poking a meat thermometer into the center of the ravioli for a reading. So long as you play it safe, you can save time and skip out on precooking meat.