My most memorable dish

I have eaten in a lot of places.  I find that eating street food in a foreign country can rank just as high as a 16 course dinner at Joel Rubuchon.  It is about the moment that you are in.. at the moment!  The most memorable thing I have ever eaten has to be an egg yolk ravioli over wilted spinach with black truffle.  It was at Artner in Vienna, Austria.  I totally loved this dish and had never had anything like it.  It won me over so much that here I am 3 years later still talking about it and trying to replicate it.  Until then I had never heard of a runny egg yolk encased in fresh pasta over anything.  Since then I have done some online research and found that it is a pretty old Italian dish.  I also have talked about this with a lot of people and gotten a lot of input about recreating this dish.

This time (virgin run) I wanted to go pretty simple, pretty traditional.  So I started out making some semolina pasta dough.  I think you can even buy the fresh pasta sheets here and use it.  Then I made a ricotta mixture- fresh garlic, ricotta, s&p, and lemon zest.  After I cut out the squares to build my ravioli I put a little spoonful of ricotta, making sure to create a well to hold the egg yolk.  Trick to the egg yolks... use VERY FRESH & VERY COLD EGGS.  Once you get this part together- wet the edges and press another square of pasta over top..... be very careful at this point.... I broke two completely before I even got going!    Then I popped them in the fridge to get very cold.  I boiled some heavily salted water and separately wilted some spinach in a saute pan.  Once the water was rolling I dropped in the ravioli and let it simmer away.  I didn't want it to be to over cooked so I let it go about 2.5, 3 minutes total.  I plated the spinach as the base and the ravioli over top, then I drizzled some black truffle butter over it all and grated some fresh black truffle for good measure.  Since I was feeding the family I had some roasted Chilean Sea Bass as well.

FYI, everyone loved it.

Next time I would certainly jazz it up- as someone suggested a base of duxelle in place of ricotta would be delish or using quail eggs.... all great ideas for another endeavor.