Venison Ravioli

I have been obsessing over making venison ravioli for the last few weeks so finally gave it a shot today and was pretty pleased with the outcome.

I started making the basic pasta, 500g "00" flour and 5 whole eggs (I sometimes substitute one whole egg for 2 yolks if I want a richer pasta but I felt that the filling would stand up for itself).

20 minutes of hard kneading and working later and I had a nice smooth dough. I put it in the fridge until I needed it so that I could get to work on the all important filling


First up, I had to finely chop my onion and mush together the minced venison. I was using venison burgers from sainsburys as they don't seem to have any flavourings in (so a neutral vension taste) and I'm only a poor student and so cant afford steaks to mince myself. I also got out everything else I needed: Cayenne pepper, cocoa powder, red wine and black pepper.



I fried the onion gently until it was nicely translucent before adding the venison and setting the gas on the highest heat possible. My aim here was to try and get some caramelisation on the meat for added depth. You know it's at that point when you start hearing a charactersitic "popping" sound.

I then deglazed the pan with about a glass worth of red wine before reducing. As this gets down to almost nothing add a large pinch of the cayenne pepper and a couple of teaspoons of cocoa (If I were to do this again I would probably use a little more: in the final result there was a nice bitter note but I didn't get that heady chocolate smell that I was after) and plenty of pepper.

I let it cool and begun rolling out my pasta and cutting it into circles before forming my ravioli. This was quite a labourful process as I didn't want the pasta discs to dry out at all before I tried constructing the ravioli as I was worried that the edges wouldnt stick together. This meant that I had to keep doing it bit by bit making a few ravioli at a time.


Soon enough I had a load of them and then left the pasta to dry out a little so that they wouldn't stick together once cooked. I also went out and bought my favourite bread to go with the meal (Niall, this photo is for you)

I simply then had to boil the ravioli up and I had a separate pan at the side that had warmed olive oil and seasoning where I could put the cooked ones to 'dress' them a little (I didn't want to make a sauce as I didn't want to take away from the ravioli themselves). It was also useful whilst I cooked up the other batches.

The final result: