Fresh Pasta - I'm not afraid anymore

For some reason I had this fear of making fresh pasta....it could be due to a pretty much inedible gnocchi attempt on xmas eve a few years back, but whatever the reason, I was nervous to give it a shot.  Well, when it doubt of your own skills, buy things to supplement your feeling of inadequacy, right?  So I headed over to William Sonoma on Sunday and picked up a pasta roller, figuring if I could at least get the dough right, I could bypass the whole "old-italian-grandma hand rolling pasta" thing by using a hand cranked roller. 

Armed with my shiny new roller, I decided to give it a try.  Heaven forbid I just try something easy on foodnetwork, so I hauled out my French Laundry cookbook and decided to give Thomas Keller a run for his money. I settled on a sweet potato ravioli and figured I would concoct my own white wine mushroom sauce.  The filling was fairly easy (roasted some sweet potatoes, added a bunch of butter, some buttermilk, nutmeg, salt, pepper and of course some bacon).  I finished that first and set it aside to cool while I gave pasta dough a shot.

I read the directions in Kellers book, but in the end decided I need a more visual demonstration of his technique for kneading the dough as he said you don't knead it like you would a bread dough so I headed to YouTube.  Found a few great videos and armed with my new knowledge, gave it a shot.  It was crazy easy!

 About 10 minutes of kneading and then I let it rest for about 30 minutes before I rolled it through my shiny new pasta roller into sheets for ravioli.  I threw the filling on, folded it over and sealed them closed with some egg wash.

Overall a lot more simple than I thought.  That said, my ravioli technique needs a ton of improvement.  The mushroom sauce turned out fantastic, but I should have used white button mushrooms instead of baby portabellas....once the portabellas were cooked and I had blended the sauce with an immersion blender, the sauce took on a bit of a grey color, which I wasn't a huge fan of.  Lesson learned.