Chocolate Pasta? Not.

Desserts are glorious. Sugar, eggs, cream, chocolate of some sort and sometimes flour. How can you go wrong? Now, there are desserts I don't enjoy; but I usually don't make them. If I have no choice, I don't partake. I am also blessed with patient and willing guinea pigs...I mean, taste testers. But the drawback of working out new recipes is having to taste your own creation (first).

Much like the arctic char of several weeks ago, this sounded great on paper:

Chocolate Ravioli Stuffed with Honey-Mascarpone in Crème Anglaise.

Until I actually ate it. It's seldom that a dessert makes me gag. But it's good to know that I'm capable of inducing new sensations with my own cooking.

Hubby made fresh taglietelle and sundried tomato pesto for dinner last weekend. Seeing the leftover pasta dough in the fridge next to a jar of chocolate syrup got me thinking (not always a good thing). I recently gave up sleep to read through some more food blogs and found the impressively creative Chopper Dave and Mrs. D over at Belly-Timber. They made an amazing checkerboard pasta that bent my mind about possibilities. There was nothing that said pasta couldn't be made for dessert, or serve as a vessel for a sweet sauce. Surely what I could do with fresh pasta and a tomato sauce I could also do with sweet pasta and crème anglaise?

I consulted various cookbooks but a recipe for chocolate pasta proved elusive (shouldn't this have clued me in?). After trial and error, I found something that worked. Excepting the addition of cocoa powder and confectioner's sugar, chocolate pasta is made the same way as regular pasta (eggs, flour). This means that the only way the pasta can be cooked is to boil it. Let us imagine that you wish to make a stuffed ravioli. When you add a dollop of mascarpone cheese -- a rather fragile clotted cream -- to make the ravioli, and throw it in boiling water, what you get in your mouth is an unholy mess of revolting textures. The ravioli left my mouth as quickly as it entered, and found its way into the sink disposal while I dry heaved and clawed at my tongue.

Okay, it wasn't that bad. But really, that's how I felt. So scratch the mascarpone stuffed ravioli -- unless I can somehow find a way to prevent the mascarpone from melting. I thought about trying this with ricotta, but that will have to wait to another day.

Now, after an experience that renders you insensate with revulsion, you think it's time to stop, yes? Sadly, I was starring in my own "Fear Factor" version of Cook's Illustrated. Deciding that ravioli was not the answer (for now), I took the remaining ball of dough, rolled it out into thin sheets and used the ravioli wheel to make chocolate ribbon pasta. Skipping the crème anglaise, I decided to go with a white chocolate sauce. The final result looked good when I plated it.

But I had some sense of self preservation, so Greg was the first person to taste it. He took a bite and uttered something in Japanese. Not a good sign because Greg isn't Asian and his first language isn't Japanese. "Chutouhanpa." He sighed. "Sometimes I wish there were equivalent words in English. It's a rough translation, but it means, 'caught between.' It's not sweet enough to be a dessert yet but not quite anything else either."

Okay, I would say that's definitely not rousing endorsement.

Greg: "It's nice to know that you have failures in the kitchen."

All the time, man. All the time. Back to the drawing board. But not for a few weeks. A stupidly ambitious dinner party is planned for Thursday, and then it's off to Phoenix to visit Peggy and Sunil, and our trip to Vermont is the week following.

Something to rock me to sleep.

Comments

[beastmomma]

Don't you wish that you could just get rewarded for trying something new?

[J]

hi cathy, plated dish looks real pretty though - at first glance, i thought you had made porcini flavoured pasta, that is, until i read the post!

[Nic]

I think that this sounds promising. Try a ricotta and honey filling in the ravioli. I think it will hold up much better to the boiling.

[Cath]

Jaspreet -- absolutely. I wish I had rewarded myself by not putting that abomination in my mouth! :-)

J -- I should have made porcini flavored pasta (hmm...) -- but the plating confirmed that you can hide most flaws if you can dress it well... ;-)

Nic, I'm thinking you're right. I think a sweet ricotta with honey is the way to go. But I think the dough has to be sweeter, too, more chocolate-y. i'll tackle this again in a few weeks. I'll just need more taste testers.

[shammi]

Hahaha, this post made great reading :) I'll have to say that you're far, far braver than I'll ever be... I mean, chocolate pasta? I'll be keeping an eye out for the update, though :) Keep up the experimentation!

[Ruth]

What a terrific post. I'm sorry for your mishap, I've had a few myself. But what a great story to tell.

Thanks for the chuckle. You certainly have a way with words.

[Cath]

Hi Shammi, yeah, I'm definitely going to try this again. I'm not sure if it was bravery as much as knowing better and still doing it (could this be stupidity?)...

Ruth, thanks for the nice words!

[Chanit]

A great dessert , Thanks :-)

[Luisa]

Cath - I'm so sorry your dish didn't work out the way you imagined, but take comfort in the fact that you got a pretty hysterical post out of it! I am giggling here at my desk... not laughing at you, but with you! :)

[Cath]

Chanit, thank you for stopping by!

Luisa, no, no, laugh AT me, cuz I certainly was after I spit the ravioli out in the sink!

[Jell-o]

The chocolate ravioli that I have had, have been delightful. The trick is to fry the ravioli, not boil it.

[Cath]

Hmmm....you'd think that living in a culture which worships frying I would have thought of this?! Cool idea! I'm going to have to try this again. Oddly enough, I was going to fry ravioli for Stephanie's Big Game night Blog Party...Thank you!

[Toby Stevenson]

I recently had a fantastic chocolate ravioli and Becco's Italian restaurant in New York. It was not a desert dish though. The chocolate was very subtle in the dish, not overpowering at all, and the ravioli was stuffed with squash (a variety of winter squash I hadn't heard of before and can't remember for the life of me now).

[Cath Hong-Praslick]

Toby, this sounds really interesting...I'm going to have to check this out. I never thought to use chocolate as a main dish and not as a dessert...hmmm....Thanks so much for letting me know about this!