For Valentine's Day - Beet Pasta Ravioli with Goat Cheese, Hazelnuts, Chives
February 6, 2012 
If you're like us and avoid restaurants on Valentine's Day, this is the dish for you. This is killer. The beautiful deep magenta color of the pasta just reminded me of Valentine's Day. The filling of goat cheese, Parmigiano cheese and chives is so luscious and creamy. And I thought some toasted chopped hazelnuts on top would add the perfect texture. The filling is a breeze to make and the pasta dough is just plain fun.
We've been concentrating on homemade pastas this winter and you should add this to your cooking arsenal - making flavored pasta doughs is easy. If you have a food processor or mixer, it's really easy. For this pasta, beets are simply roasted in the oven and then allowed to cool. Pureeing them in the food processor along with the eggs and flour is the easiest way to make this dough. My favorite way to make pasta dough is to add some semolina flour to the all purpose flour - it gives the dough a little bit firmer texture and bite, which I like. If all you have is all purpose flour, you can make the dough with just that.
Beet Pasta Ravioli with Goat Cheese, Hazelnuts, Chives
for a printable recipe, click here
makes about 50 ravioli
If you don't need 50 ravioli, this recipe is easily halved, but I suggest you make the full batch and freeze half for later.
Special equipment that helps: You will need a ravioli mold for this recipe. Of course, you can assemble these without a mold - it just makes it a lot easier. Also, a small pastry brush, a spider and a fluted plastry wheel are all helpful.
Ingredients:
for the filling:
- 11 ounces plain goat cheese
- 1/2 cup freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese
- 1 tablespoon chopped chives
- 1 egg
- salt and pepper to taste
for the pasta dough:
- 3 small beets, scrubbed
- olive oil
- salt and pepper
- 3 large eggs, room temperature
- 1-1/2 cups all purpose flour (plus more for dusting)
- 1/2 cup semolina flour
for the sauce:
- 2 tablespoons chopped hazelnuts
- 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
- 1/4 cup butter (real butter)
- 2 tablespoons chopped chives
Instructions:
Mix all the ingredients for the filling in a bowl and refrigerate.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Line a small baking pan with foil. Trim the stems and tip off the beets and place on the foil. Drizzle with just a little olive oil and some salt and pepper and roast for 45 minutes. Set aside to cool.
Leave the oven on and place the hazelnuts for the sauce on a foil lined baking sheet and toast for just 4 or 5 minutes, just until they are fragrant. Set aside.
After the beets have cooled, take a small paring knife and peel off the skins. Quarter the beets and place in a food processor. Add the eggs and flours. Pulse until a ball of dough forms. Add a little more flour, a tablespoon at a time, until a dough forms that is not dry, but still a little bit sticky. Take the dough out, knead a little on the counter and place on a sheet of floured plastic wrap and wrap. Let rest on the counter for at least 20 minutes. Take your cheese filling out of the fridge and let the chill come off a little.
Cut the dough in half and run it through the widest setting on your pasta rollers. Fold in half and run it through again. If it is sticking to the rollers, flour it a little. You don't want the pasta too dry but you don't wait it to stick to the rollers. Adjust the rollers to the second setting and run the pasta through. Keep running the pasta through, without folding, until you have run it through the #5 setting. Don't go past the #5 setting for ravioli - the dough will be too thin and may break during cooking. And don't let your pasta sheets dry, like you do when you make fettuccine or spaghetti - you want them a bit sticky. Use them right away.
Lay a pasta sheet out on the counter and place the ravioli mold next to it. Cut the pasta sheet a little bit longer than the ravioli mold. You should have 3 - 4 cut sheets from this strip. Flour the ravioli mold a little. Lay one sheet on top of the mold and gently make indentations into the wells of the mold. Fill a quart size plastic bag (or a pastry bag with tip) with the filling. Cut a corner off the plastic bag and pipe the filling into the indentations. Just pipe about a heaping teaspoon of the filling in each well. With a small pastry brush (or even just your finger), brush a little water onto the dough around the filling so it will be moist and act like a glue. Lay a second sheet of pasta on top. Run a rolling pin over the top and invert the mold. The ravioli will not be separated completely, so use the fluted pastry wheel to cut them. Place on a floured baking sheet. Repeat with the remaining dough and filling.
Bring a large pot of well salted water to a boil. Place a large skillet on your stove. Warm the olive oil and butter for the sauce in the skillet. Using the spider, lower half of the ravioli into the water and boil gently, not vigorously, for about 4 minutes. Lift them out with the spider and place them into the skillet. Gently toss with the butter and oil and keep warm. Add half of the chives and hazelnuts and toss. Repeat with the remaining ravioli and toss with the butter and oil. Transfer to a pasta bowl and sprinkle the remaining chopped chives and hazelnuts on top and serve.
Reader Comments (75)
Reading through the comments, I had an inspirational thought. If I had a pasta roller, I wouldn't hesitate to use these sheets in a lasagna. What an absolutely gorgeous dish this pasta would make! Thank you for sharing this. I will try to roll it by hand and see if I can do this.
I'm unable to eat gluten. have you tried any substitute flours for this recipe?
Thanks
Cora
My son has an egg allergy. Can you make the dough without egg? Thanks, Joan
Hello -
I have seen several questions about this but no answer. We made this ravioli and it turned an ugly pink in the cooking process. Tasted great but we hope to make it for New Years Eve and really want it to look like your pictures. It seems that the pretty color is the whole poit since you can't taste the beets. Can you help? Did we do something wrong?
From The Italian Dish:
Caroline: The dough will be bright pink before cooking, but after cooking it will not be so bright pink. There is nothing you can do to prevent this, frankly. If you look at my photo, the cooked ravioli in the opening photo is not as bright pink as the uncooked dough. However, even after the ravioli is cooked I would not describe it as an "ugly pink" so I'm not sure what happened. Maybe it is just the variability of beets. Not sure. Hope you will try again.
Thanks for the advice! We will try again with a few more beets and maybe a teeny bit of beet juice. Our ravioli were not as pretty as the ones in your picture and we want to try again!!
Caroline
I had my doubts on the ratios in this recipe when I first read it (typically 3/4 cup flour to each egg...more flour to compensate for extra liquidity from puree), but decided to give it a whirl as written anyway. I made a double batch, and just as expected, nowhere near enough flour to achieve the right texture (even doing 5 eggs instead of 6). I added at least an extra cup of flour to the original recipe. My advice to anyone trying it out: start with 2-1/2 cups of total flour instead of 2 (depending on the size of your beets, you may need to add extra to that, but it's a good starting point). 2 cups of flour isn't even enough to offset the liquid of the 3 eggs.
From The Italian Dish:
Nina: The reason for that is the 1/2 cup of semolina flour in the recipe. When you use semolina in pasta dough, it absorbs a lot more liquid than regular flour. The amount of flour will depend on your beets, though. There will be a variation in the size and type of beet people use and how moist they are. Ultimately, as in any pasta dough, you want to just keep adding flour until the dough is the correct consistency - not too dry and not too sticky. It should feel a bit like Play-Dough.
I made the beetroot ravioli today but omitting the eggs and a filling of ricotta cheese. The ravioli tasted good but the colour was not pink at all. I used fresh beetroot, boiled and pureed with water. The dough was left for more than 2 hours as I had to rush out to complete some work, so do you think that is the reason why on boiling the ravioli, the colour was very dull purplish red.
Just wonderful! Made and served along side your stuffed zucchini recipe... Which is also WOW. Your blog makes me feel confident in my kitchen adventures; thank you! Only wished I loved in MI to partake in your cooking classes.
I made this for a late Vday celebration. Subbed pine nuts for the hazelnuts. Super tasty, AND required much more flour than indicated in the recipe. I made these a day ahead and stored them in the refrigerator overnight. I would not recommend this, as the ravioli, even though it was well floured, soaked up all the flour overnight and became incredibly sticky.
Thanks for the delicious and beautiful idea!
I tried this with hazelnuts and I loved it, but I also tried it with pistachios (mostly for the presentation color) but they add an amazing flavor to the dish, you all should try it! Thank you so much for this recipe, I totally love this website, it is just wonderful! :)
I made this and it was to die for! However, the dough was so incredibly sticky that I had to add 8 additional cups of flour just to make to dough usable! I've seen some other posts with the same problem, any ideas why the dough is so sticky?
From The Italian Dish:
Lauren: You know, the amount of flour will depend on the differences in beets and eggs. The recipe says small beets, but that is highly variable! If you use somewhat larger beets or they just have more moisture, that will make the dough wetter. Also, eggs can be very different, too. When I give a pasta making class I tell my students to keep adding dough until the dough is no longer sticky enough to come off on your hands, but still feels slightly "wet" - like Play-Doh feels. This is the only real way you can deal with variables like vegetables and eggs in a pasta dough. So don't be afraid to keep adding a little flour until it feels right. Eight additional cups, however, is a mystery to me. Did you use real large beets?
Also, the semolina flour absorbs more moisture than regular flour. If you did not use any semolina, you would need a little more regular flour.
Hope this helps!
These look gorgeous. I do a salad which is similar- roasted beets, arugula, goat cheese and hazelnuts or pistachios but I never thought to do it as a pasta combination. I will definitely try this.
I have eaten a similar combination to this one in Italy in the Alto Adige but it was pasta stuffed with beets and topped with cheese! I think I prefer the sound of this one. Thanks!
I, like many other commenters, had a very difficult time with the stickiness of the dough. I ended up adding 3 1/2 cups of additional flour to the 2 cups called for. The 3 1/2 additional was all semolina flour. So after 5/12 cups of flour in total, I had a dough that was usable.
I definitely appreciate that there are differences in the size of the beets and eggs, but more than doubling the flour I found to be excessive and frustrating. I've made pasta dough in my food processor before, so I could tell that something was wrong. Had I not, I likely would have broken the engine - it was that hard to work with, and very difficult to clean up.
It may be helpful to note how much of the beet/egg puree you added to the 2 cups of flour. It would help get the ratios correct for those that had issues. The issues I had were due to differences in ratio no doubt, it would just be helpful to have a more precise metric so that the recipe could work for others as well as it did for you!
Your pictures are beautiful, and I've never had trouble with any other recipe, which is what was prompting me to leave this comment!
I made this yesterday and fortunately I had two experienced (Italian descent) ladies to help me.
I used four large beetroots (by mistake) so ended up with about 200 instead of 50 Ravioli.
Huge hit as an entree and I will make it again.
I have wanted to make these beet ravioli for gee I don't know a year or more. Well, it finally happened yesterday! I had an abundance of beets in my garden this past summer and I harvested them, roasted them and froze them with the intention of making some beet recipes over the winter when I was missing my garden. With Christmas over I finally made the time to make this happen! I am definitely a beginner pasta maker and am a firm believer that the more you do something the better you will get at it and by the time I made the last ravioli I felt like quite the little pro! I did change the filling because we are not too big on goat cheese. I did 3oz each of: goat cheese, mozzarella, Asiago, and Mascarpone and then the parmigiana, chives, egg, salt & pepper and let me tell you the filling was AMAZING! I'm inspired to try a meat mixture and make some more. Great little project for those snowy days where you just want to be in the house making an AMAZING dinner for your family! It made enough that I froze about 20 and now I have those to put with my next batch which I'm thinking will be for Valentine's Day! I just wanted to try it out and see how long it took etc. so that I know going forward what I'm getting myself into. Thank you for the great post! Looking forward to more pasta making in 2016!
From The Italian Dish:
Sheila: So glad you loved the ravioli and how clever are you to freeze your beets? That's a great idea. Thanks for sharing!
Followed this recipe to the letter and it was so delicious!! I ran out of time once I made the dough so wrapped it in plastic wrap and stored it in the refrigerator for 24 hours. Was still perfect :-)
Slaved away for over 2 hours cause I didn't have a pasta machine or the other utensils mentioned. Made half and put the rest of the dough and filling in the freezer. I also didn't have hazelnuts so I used walnuts as a substitute. It was all very yummy!! Thank you Elaine!
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Love this recipe and made it again tonight. Have loved it for a long time. A go to for valentines day but good any time. The pasta is a little wet with 3 eggs to two cups of flour. Add a little more flour and its great.