This is another of those things that I’ve made a couple of times by just adding this and that until it tasted good, but then forgot what all was in it when it came time to make it again. So it was time to try to re-create it once more and document all the various components.

The one change I made this time was to experiment with fermenting the habaneros. I tried this a while back with red jalapeños for a homemade sriracha sauce that turned out really well, so I thought I’d give it a try with this sauce. The habaneros definitely fermented as you can see from the photos below, although not to the same extent that the jalapeños did with the sriracha sauce. The peppers began bubbling within a day and by the third day had risen a couple of inches above the initial volume where I placed the rubber band on the jar. They didn’t rise much more than that and by the fifth day the bubbling had stopped, indicating that that was all the fermenting that it was going to do. The fermentation process does give it a little extra depth of flavor and a bit of sour flavor that helps offset some of the sweetness.

This was also a great use for my bottle of Rancho Gordo’s banana vinegar. I’ve had the bottle for a while and it has a such a great flavor that I’m always looking for a use for it. Rancho Gordo is mainly known for their dried beans (which are also really good), but they have a small selection of other interesting specialty products, usually sourced from small producers in Mexico. Since the sauce has vinegar in it anyway, and with the habaneros and mango giving it a sort of Caribbean fruity flavor, the sweet and sour banana flavor of the vinegar really worked well with the sauce. If you haven’t given banana vinegar a try, pick up a bottle and see what creative ideas you can come up with. Since the banana vinegar is on the sweet side I found it still needed a bit more of an acidic kick, even with the fermentation. I ended up adding a bit more apple cider vinegar to balance the banana sweetness.

I mention in the recipe below that aging the sauce a bit helps. I found that after 30 days in the refrigerator the fiery heat of the habaneros receded a bit and the flavors really began to blend together nicely to produce a more balanced sauce.

This has become our go-to sauce for weekend brunch, especially on egg dishes (poached, scrambled, eggs benedict, breakfast burritos, etc). I’ve also used it with grilled meats and fish dishes, and blended it in to barbecue sauces for a little extra kick.  It has a great balance of hot, sweet and sour without any one element being too dominant. It’s made with habaneros though, so it is hot. Much hotter than tabasco or similar sauces. But if you like sauces on the hot side, this is one to try. If you like things even hotter you could probably leave the seeds in and see what happens. You could also experiment with the spices. I like the hint of Caribbean flavors here with the curry and cinnamon and allspice, but you could certainly leave out the curry and adjust the proportions of the others more to your own taste.

Mango Habanero Sauce

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Ingredients

• 600g Whole Habaneros
• 5g Kosher salt
• 1 clove Garlic (peeled, toasted in a pan until a bit brown and then chopped)
• 450g Fresh mango (peeled and chopped)
• 125g Brown sugar
• 100g Yellow mustard
• 100g Banana vinegar
• 75g Molasses
• 50g Cider Vinegar
• 5g Curry powder
• 5g Cumin
• 5g Smoked paprika
• 5g New Mexico ground chili powder
• 3g Cinnamon
• 3g Kosher salt
• 3g Coriander
• 2g Allspice

Directions

1.	Wearing gloves(!), remove stem and seeds from habanero peppers. Roughly chop peppers and mix with chopped garlic clove and 5 grams of kosher salt. Puree with 5 or 6 pulses in a food processor until everything is mixed well. Place pepper mix in a loosely sealed jar and wait a few days. It should start expanding after a day or two, then stop a day or two after that.
2.	Add the fermented habaneros to the remainder of the ingredients in a pan and place on the stove over medium-low heat. Simmer gently for a couple of hours until the mango is completely soft. Remove from heat and let cool a bit before blending.
3.	Working in batches if needed, add cooked sauce to a blender and blend until completely smooth.
4.	Return blended sauce to pan and gently simmer another 30 minutes or so, until the sauce is at your own personal desired consistency.
5.	Once thickened, remove from heat and cool. Place in a sealed container and refrigerate. Aging the sauce for at least a couple of weeks helps mellow the flavors.

I almost missed Meyer lemon season again. Fortunately, while cleaning out the refrigerator last week I came across last year’s empty jar of preserved lemons. I left it in there because it had quite a bit of lemon flavored brine in it that I thought might work to add to the new batch of lemons. (wpe)

After getting a few pounds of lemons and washing them, I left them in a bowl on the kitchen counter for a couple of days. They are so fragrant they filled the whole kitchen with a lemony floral aroma. It was almost a shame to have to cut them up and stuff them in jars.

There isn’t much of a recipe here. Add some spices to the jars. This year I added a couple of allspice berries, a pinch of sugar, a few peppercorns, a couple pinches of hot red pepper flakes, and a bay leaf. I used some cloves last year, but felt their strong flavor kind of limited the range of dishes I could use the lemons in. I left them out this year.

Slice the lemons in quarters lengthwise, but don’t cut all the way through the end. Leave them slightly attached so you can coat the inside with salt. Just add a big pinch of kosher salt in between the slices, gently squeeze the lemon back together, rub some salt around the outside and then place in to the jar.
Once the jar was full of lemons I sprinkled a bit more salt on top, then poured half of the remainder of last year’s brine into each jar. They weren’t quite full, so a squeeze of juice from a couple of the left over lemons brought the juice up to the top of the jar.
Put the lid on and then place in the refrigerator for 2 or 3 weeks and then they should be ready to use.

My batch last year lasted for almost a year. To use, just take a piece out of the jar, pull the peel away from the flesh and finely slice or dice the peel.  These are great to use in any dish that could use a little extra punch of citrus or salt. I use them all the time in lentils, curry dishes, braised kale, lamb dishes, etc. It’s a great staple to have in the pantry to give an extra zing to otherwise ordinary dishes.

 So it’s been about two months since my last addition of extra lemon zest to the limoncello. The extra zest and additional two months made a big difference in the lemony intensity. Tasting it straight it’s still really strong, like a strong lemon extract, but the sharper edges from the Everclear have started to round out a bit.

So it looked like it was time to strain the zest out. I am still really amazed at how clear this batch turned out. The two previous attempts I’ve made at limoncello resulted in a really cloudy solution that I never did get properly strained. That is definitely not an issue with this batch. In fact, I had a tough time getting a photo of the jar that showed the deep lemon-yellow color the liquid had become. It was so transparent that it took a lot of fiddling with the lighting angle to get it to hit it just right for the camera to pick it up.

I didn’t have a kitchen funnel large enough to handle a batch this size, so I decided to use my new Chemex coffee maker. The 6 cup coffee maker turned out to be the perfect size. The Chemex filters are slightly thicker than a normal coffee filter so I figured that would help as well to keep any fine particulates from getting into jar.

After filtering that left me with just over 5 cups of liquid. The next step was to dilute and sweeten it. I made a batch of simple syrup by just taking equal parts of white sugar and water, bringing to a boil for two minutes, and then cooling. How much to add is sort of a matter of taste. I had added a bit of 80 proof vodka to the original batch because the bottle of Everclear wasn’t quite enough to fill the jug. So that brought the alcohol content down slightly. I ended up adding just under 3 cups of simple syrup solution to bring it up to about 8 cups total. I opted to keep it a little less sweet than I might want it in the end, figuring I could add a little more after it’s had a couple of months to mellow in the bottle. I’m guessing the 3 cups of simple syrup might have brought the limoncello down to around 100 proof – still pretty strong, but definitely more palatable than the straight lemony Everclear.

 I had been wondering what would happen when I added the simple syrup. The liquid before adding it in was so clear I was worried it wouldn’t get that bright yellow color that limoncello should have. Obviously there was nothing to worry about. It brightened up as soon as the syrup hit it.

I had enough to fill two 750ml bottles with a bit left over. As an experiment, I took the left over amount and added it to another jar with a vanilla bean. I’m not sure where that idea came from, but a vanilla limoncello sounded intriguing.  I’ll leave the bottles alone for a couple months and give it a taste taste then. From my previous batches it seems they continue mellowing for at least 6 months, so I’ll try to keep track of how these change.

In the mean time, it might be time to start another batch.

I had this idea for s’mores waffle cones last summer, but never got around to figuring out how to put it all together. The idea was to have a light, toasted marshmallow flavored ice cream, inside a graham cracker flavored waffle cone, then somehow get a chocolate flavor in the middle somewhere.

So that was the basic idea that I started working on last week. I tackled the ice cream first and went through several batches until I found a combination I was happy with. I wanted to keep the texture light, so ideally it wouldn’t have any eggs in it.
For inspiration here I started with the base ice cream mix found in Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home. She omits eggs, instead boiling the milk, cream and sugar mixture, smoothing the texture with a bit of cream cheese and corn syrup, then adding corn starch to reduce ice crystal formation. I’ve made quite a few batches of ice cream using her recipes and have been really pleased with them. Unfortunately there was no toasted marshmallow ice cream recipe in the book so I had to figure that out. 

The main issue was how to get the toasted marshmallow flavor in to the milk. I first started by toasting regular marshmallows then adding them to milk to let it infuse in the refrigerator for several hours. This made a strongly flavored toasted marshmallow milk, but once frozen the flavor was too muted. So I moved to mini marshmallows to increase the surface area available for toasting. I used a butane torch to toast them, but the oven broiler would work fine. And as I found, don’t be afraid to get some a little charred. I was initially afraid it would turn the ice cream bitter, but it actually helps in bringing in a little more of the real s’mores flavor.

A glance at the ingredients list on the bag of marshmallows shows they’re mainly sugar, corn syrup and corn starch. In other words, things that were already in the base ice cream recipe. So I decided to add the whole toasted marshmallows in to the mix. This let me reduce the sugar in the base recipe as well as leave out the corn syrup and corn starch. I just scooped up the whole toasted gooey mess and scraped it in to the blender with the cream cheese and blended on low speed until it turned in to a nice toasted marshmallow cream.

The next step was the graham cracker waffle cone. This took a few attempts to get right. Almost all the recipes I looked at for the cones were the same: egg whites, cream, sugar, butter and flour. A regular waffle cone recipe gets crispy as soon as it cools. But I wanted the graham cracker flavor so I initially used straight graham flour,which is an even coarser version of whole wheat flour, along with brown sugar and molasses. Unfortunately it seemed that the extra density of the flour kept it from getting crisp. It remained fairly soft and more waffle like (graham flour waffles — an idea I might come back to). So to lighten it up I substituted 1/3 of the graham flour for cake flour and mixed the brown sugar with regular white sugar.

The final step was the chocolate. My initial idea was to coat the inside of the cone with chocolate. This didn’t work too well for two reasons. One, the cones are really fragile and broke easily while trying to get the inside evenly coated with chocolate. More significantly, the toasted marshmallow ice cream turns out to be quite a delicate flavor. Having that much chocolate in every bite really overwhelmed the flavor. Instead, I opted instead for just a drizzle of a chocolate sauce mixed in to the ice cream. You don’t get chocolate in every bite, just enough to know it’s there without smothering the marshmallow flavor.

So, bottom line, does it taste like a frozen s’more? Not really. The frozen texture of the ice cream is completely different from a freshly melted marshmallow. The butter and brown sugar in the crispy waffle cone gives it more of a deep, almost toffee flavor, compared to the familiar taste of a crunchy graham cracker. And the fudge ripple isn’t the same as a barely melted bite of a Hershey’s bar. But, all that aside, it is really delicious and a bit reminiscent of actual s’mores. I was especially impressed with how the toasty flavor of the marshmallows came through in the ice cream and it really works nicely with that buttery flavor in the waffle cones. I think this is one I’ll keep on the summertime treat list.

* Ice cream adapted from Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home by Jeni Britton Bauer

* Chocolate Ripple Sauce adapted from The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz

Toasted Marshmallow Fudge Ripple Ice Cream

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Serves	8
Prep time	15 minutes
Cook time	45 minutes
Total time	1 hour
Meal type	Dessert

Ingredients

Ice Cream

• 200g mini marshmallows (toasted)
• 40g cream cheese
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/8 teaspoon kosher salt
• 70g sugar
• 2 cups whole milk
• 1 cup heavy cream

Chocolate Ripple Sauce

• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon corn syrup
• 1/4 cup water
• 2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 tablespoon dark chocolate of your choice (finely chopped)
• 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions

Ice Cream
1.	Spread marshmallows on a baking sheet and toast all sides with kitchen torch, or under the oven broiler. Getting some a little charred is okay.
2.	Add toasted marshmallows to blender along with cream cheese, vanilla extract and salt. Slowly blend until all ingredients are mixed together and it has turned into a smooth marshmallow paste.
3.	Add remaining ice cream ingredients to pan on stove top. Slowly bring to a boil, stirring often to keep the milk from burning on the bottom. Bring to a boil and continue to boil and stir for 4 minutes. Remove from heat.
4.	Add boiled milk to blender containing blended marshmallows. Slowly blend for a few seconds to thoroughly combine all ingredients.
5.	Transfer blender contents into a bowl (preferably metal) and either place in an ice bath or in the refrigerator until thoroughly chilled.
6.	Add chilled ingredients to ice cream maker and churn until finished according to whatever ice cream maker you're using.
7.	Scoop ice cream into a one quart freezer safe container, alternating 2-3 inches of ice cream with a drizzle of 2 tablespoons of chocolate ripple sauce. Cover and place in freezer for at least two hours to chill completely.
Chocolate Ripple Sauce
8.	While ice cream is in mixer, add remaining sugar, corn syrup, water, cocoa and chocolate to saucepan on medium low heat.
9.	Gently heat chocolate sauce until it is melted and bring to a low simmer for a couple of minutes. Remove from heat to let cool and stir in remaining 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract. Refrigerate to cool while ice cream finishes mixing.

“Graham Cracker” Waffle Cones

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Serves	6
Prep time	5 minutes
Cook time	20 minutes
Total time	25 minutes
Meal type	Dessert

Ingredients

• 2 egg whites
• 1/4 cup heavy cream
• 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• 50g dark brown sugar
• 30g sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 teaspoons molasses
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 5 tablespoons butter (melted and cooled)
• 65g graham flour
• 35g cake flour

Directions

1.	In medium bowl, whisk egg whites and cream together to combine.
2.	To egg whites and cream add sugars, salt, vanilla, molasses, cinnamon and melted butter. Whisk to combine thoroughly.
3.	Add graham flour and cake flour and stir gently to barely combine.
4.	Add 1/4 cup scoops to waffle cone iron and bake according to iron's directions. Fold waffle over cone shaping tool and seal seams. Gently set aside until ready to fill with ice cream.

I had kind of forgotten about the limoncello over the last couple of weeks. I’m bad about remembering to write things down and put labels on projects with dates, so I couldn’t recall exactly how long it had been since I started the batch. The good thing about starting the blog for these types of projects is I just had to look at the date from the previous post. It turns out it had been exactly four weeks, which was a good time to check in on its progress.

At this point it sort of tastes like lemony fire. The Everclear has definitely extracted a lot of lemon flavor, but it’s extremely harsh. I am surprised, though, at how clear it is right now. I know the last time I made a batch of limoncello it was almost impossible to get it clear, even after straining many times. I’m not sure if it’s more clear this time due to the Everclear, or maybe grating the lemons with the microplane kept the lemon pith out which contributed to the murkiness the last time around.

Considering that it will have to be diluted quite a bit to make it palatable, at the moment I don’t think it has quite enough lemon flavor. So I decided to add some extra lemon zest. As strong as the Everclear is, I don’t think there’s much danger of it being too lemony.  I zested 8 more large organic lemons to add to the mix. That gave me a pile of zest that weighed right at 20 grams. So it’s up to about 60 grams of zest total right now.

I added this zest in and gave it a good shake and put it back in the cabinet. I’ll check in on it again in another month or so and see how it’s doing.

I’ve been working with my sourdough starter for the last few months and trying to bake at least one loaf a week. Usually I tweak at least one thing every time I make a loaf. Sometimes more than one thing, so the results haven’t been very consistent. But I thought it would be good to come up with a solid baseline loaf and document that so I have something to use as a comparison for future experiments.

I like the flavor from adding some whole wheat to the dough, but it can make the dough a lot heavier. I’ve found that adding more 20% whole wheat flour (as a percentage of total flour) makes it denser than I care for, making it difficult for the nooks and crannies to develop that are found in any decent sourdough loaf. Adding a bit of gluten seems to help.

The main difficulties I’ve had in producing a consistent loaf are a decent rise in the oven, getting those nooks and crannies to form, and getting a deep brown and crispy crust to form. So I’ve been implementing some techniques that seem to be helping in these areas.

Getting a properly hydrated dough proved to be one of the keys to getting the right texture in the dough. I think my previous bread making attempts weren’t as successful because the dough wasn’t wet enough. The wetter dough is a little more difficult to work with, but the kneading technique below helps with that. If I’ve done the math right, the recipe for this loaf is a 68% hydration, which seems about right for what I’m looking for.

The next involved the kneading of the dough. Previously I’d mixed the dough in the Kitchenaid for 10-12 minutes and then let it proof from there. That worked, but a slower method helps to develop more flavor. My current method is to mix the ingredients, without salt, then let it sit, or autolyse, for 30 minutes to help the flour absorb the water and the gluten start to develop. I’ve read that the salt can interfere with yeast development, so it gets added on the second fold. After that, rather then kneading, I’ve been using the stretch and fold method, which is so easy I was really surprised how well it worked the first time I tried it. Of course, the trade-off is in time. Instead of 10 minutes in the Kitchenaid, it’s more like 4 hours of letting the dough sit, with about 5 minutes of actual stretching and folding interspersed in there.

The best trick I’ve found for getting that crunchy crust is to add some water to a cast iron skillet in the oven, and then invert a stainless steel bowl over the loaf for 15 minutes to contain the steam around the dough. The steam is the key to getting that crust. Steam contains more heat than the dry air of the oven, so it helps to quickly caramelize the outer layer of the dough. Baking in a dutch oven would work, too. I’ve just never figured out how to get the dough into the dutch oven without completely mangling it. Using the inverted bowl method, I can slide the dough onto a stone in the oven using a piece of parchment paper.

The final trick is patience — leaving the loaf in the oven long enough so that the inside is completely finished cooking and the outside has a nice deep brown crust. This is the one I still struggle with. I’m usually a bit disappointed when I first cut into the loaf because I can tell it could have used a bit more time. I’ve never come close to over cooking a loaf. That might be a good experiment, just to see how far it can be pushed and how the texture changes if it is over cooked.

Using this basic loaf as a template hopefully I’ll be able to try some new experiments in the future. I’d like to try varying levels of whole wheat, as well as other whole grains to get some different textures and flavors.

Weekly Bread #1 – Whole wheat sourdough

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Ingredients

• 250g bread flour
• 50g whole wheat flour
• 100g sourdough starter *
• 188g warm water
• 10 g gluten
• 9g kosher salt

Note

* See sourdough starter post.

Directions

1.	Add starter to bowl and stir in warm water to combine.
2.	Add bread flour, whole wheat flour and gluten to water mixture.
3.	Mix flour and water until combined and little dry flour remains. Cover bowl and allow to rest for 30 minutes.
4.	Stretch dough into rectangle. Fold into thirds, then fold into thirds again. Place in lightly oiled bowl. Cover and let rest 45 minutes.
5.	Stretch dough into rectangle again. Sprinkle salt across dough, then fold into thirds. Fold into thirds again, shape into ball and place back in bowl. Cover and let rest 45 minutes. Repeat stretch and fold one more time.
6.	Remove dough from bowl. Stretch and fold once more. Form into tight round ball and place smooth side down into floured brotform. Cover and let rest 45 minutes.
7.	When dough is in brotform, place cast iron skillet on lower shelf of oven and preheat the oven to 475f so it has a full 45 minutes to preheat.
8.	Using a sharp knife, make a slash or two in the top of the loaf. Slide bread dough into oven and pour 1/2 warm water into hot cast iron skillet. (Careful, this will produce a lot of steam). Allow steam to fill oven for a couple of minutes.
9.	Cover bread with stainless steel or other oven safe bowl and lower oven heat to 425f. Wait 15 minutes.
10.	Uncover bowl and continue backing for approximately 30 minutes until a nice brown crust has developed. Remove bread from oven and let cool completely.

I’m adding a Works in Progress page to the blog. I have quite a few things on my list to try that take weeks, if not months, to make. So rather than waiting until they’re completely finished, I thought I’d make updates along the way to track their progress.

I made limoncello a few years ago with vodka as the alcohol base and enjoyed it, although the end product turned out a bit more cloudy than I wanted it. The goal this time is to try a few different filtration techniques and see what works best. Also, I want to see if it’s possible to extract more flavor from the fruit zest by using a stronger alcohol. It doesn’t really get any stronger than Everclear.

St. Louis trivia fact – did you know that Everclear is made in St. Louis? I just recently discovered this fact. After driving to our local grocery store for years right across from the building with the big Luxco sign, I finally got around to looking up just what Luxco was. It turns out they are the makers of Everclear, among other liquors.

Unsurprisingly, Everclear is really harsh. To mellow it out a bit I poured it through a Brita water filter 5 times. It’s still pretty fiery since it’s 95% alcohol, but the filter did seem to smooth it out a bit, so hopefully this will help the end product. For this batch of limoncello I started with around 15 lemons, and just as an experiment threw in one orange. I used organic fruit, which should be pesticide and wax free. After washing, drying and then zesting all the fruit with a microplane, I ended up with around 40 grams of zest. This all got combined in the sealed jar and put into the cabinet. The lemons all got juiced and then frozen in ice cube trays for future use.

I’ll give it a little shake every few days and see how it looks in 4-6 weeks, although it’s possible the Everclear will extract the flavors faster than that. After that the plan is to divide it in to two or three portions and try some different filtration methods before diluting it and adding sweetener.

A few months ago I started an experiment in bread baking. I had been using the basic bread ratio in Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio cookbook. It gave consistent results, but it was never quite what I wanted from bread. The texture was a bit too dense, it was low on flavor and it didn’t have any of those nooks and crannies that an artisan loaf should have. No matter how I tweaked the rising times, baking times and oven temperatures I couldn’t get what I was looking for.

So I decided to strike out on my own and see what I could come up with using no recipes and a homemade sourdough starter. The first hurdle was getting the starter. I read quite a few articles saying that it was just mixing flour and water, feeding it every day, and in 3-5 days the starter should be ready to make bread. The first attempt resulted in a pile of paste after 5 days. A few weeks later I tried again, feeding every day and monitoring the temperature where it was sitting. After 3 or 4 days I saw a few bubbles and thought it was on the right track, but after a week it settled down and I assumed whatever had been living there briefly had died. So I went back to the Ruhlman ratio.

About 6 months ago I thought I’d give it one more try and did a little extra research. Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice suggests beginning the starter with a darker flour and pineapple juice. He mentions that a certain strain of yeast can produce carbon dioxide bubbles at the beginning, which gives the appearance of a successful starter, but once this strain dies out it will appear the starter is no longer active. This sounded like the problem I had with the previous attempt. The book’s timeframe for a successful starter was the same as others I’d read: 3-5 days. After 6 days it should be easily doubling in volume every day.

After mixing pineapple juice and whole wheat flour and feeding diligently every day, after 5 days I had: nothing. Not even a bubble. The pineapple juice is only used for the first 2 days, after that it’s a switch to regular flour and water. I even used bottled water on the chance that the chlorine in tap water might be interfering with the starter’s development. At this point I couldn’t think of much else to do differently so I just kept it going. Every morning I poured out half of the paste, added a new scoop of flour and an equal amount of water and stirred it all up. After 10 days of this, still nothing.

But then, around the 15th day, bubbles started emerging. I added the rubber band in the photo to keep track of its expansion and kept discarding, feeding and watering every day. Eventually, after about 30 days and a full 5 pounds of flour, I got the expansion in the photo above. I have no idea why it took 4-5 times longer than any method I’d read about.

I’ve managed to keep the starter going for about 4 months now and haven’t used any commercial yeast in that time. The next step is taking the starter and using it to produce some consistent satisfying bread. My goal is to document various attempts and show successes as well as failures and see what works and why.

Sourdough Starter

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Serves	1
Prep time	5 minutes
Meal type	Bread
From book	The Bread Baker's Apprentice

Ingredients

• 100g Whole wheat flour
• 100g Pineapple juice
• 100g All-purpose flour
• 100g filtered water

Note

This isn't much of a recipe, but in general, after the 3rd day, discard (or compost) half the starter and add equal amounts of flour and water to the remaining starter. Stir together, loosely cover and store in a warm location.

Directions

1.	Combine whole wheat flour and pineapple juice. Stir, but in clean container and loosely cover for 24 hours.
2.	Combine whole wheat flour and pineapple juice. Stir, but in clean container and loosely cover for 24 hours.
3.	Repeat first step with only half the amount of each without discarding any starter.
4.	Repeat first step with only half the amount of each without discarding any starter.
5.	Add 100 grams each of all-purpose flour and filtered water. Stir, cover loosely and set aside.
6.	Add 100 grams each of all-purpose flour and filtered water. Stir, cover loosely and set aside.
7.	After 24 hours, discard half of starter, and refresh with 100 grams each all-purpose flour and filtered water. Stir, cover loosely, and set aside.
8.	After 24 hours, discard half of starter, and refresh with 100 grams each all-purpose flour and filtered water. Stir, cover loosely, and set aside.
9.	Repeat as needed until starter roughly doubles in volume.

I’m not an Italian grandmother. I haven’t spent years making the same pasta shapes over and over, developing a feel for the pasta and how to work with it. Which is why I generally avoid making ravioli, let alone any other more complicated stuffed pasta shape. It usually goes fine up until it’s time to put the first scoop of filling onto the pasta, which is when I get lost. How much filling? How far apart should the filling be spaced? How should they be folded? Why are they falling apart?

So instead of trying to muddle through and end up with one consistently ugly batch, I split the pasta into three sections in order to analyze the mistakes from each batch and, hopefully, improve with each one.

I started with my standard pasta recipe from Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio, 3 parts flour to 2 parts egg. For the test batch I used 2 eggs. The eggs weighed 3.85 ounces, so I used 5.75 ounces of flour. This got stirred together in a bowl then dumped on the counter to need for 10-12 minutes. It needed a bit more flour once kneading began. The dough should be tacky so the ravioli will seal, but not sticky. Once it has a smooth texture, it gets wrapped and put into the refrigerator for 30 minutes or so.

I had just got some rainbow chard from the farmer’s market, so I cut the leaves off the stems, saving the stems for a sauce. I sliced these, sauteed them in olive oil with a bit of garlic, then stirred together with some chives, ricotta, parmesan an egg and salt and pepper.

First attempt at shaping, that ravioli on the left, was not so good. Overstuffed. Second attempt in the middle got a little better, but still having trouble getting the air pockets out. Finally on the right, some ravioli I could live with.