Ravioli are the dumplings of Italy, and since my wife is a vegan, we recently tired our hands at making vegan ravioli. We adapted the tofu ricotta filling recipe from an online recipe for vegan lasagne. The original recipe had too much lemon flavor, so here we have halved the lemon jest and juice used, we also tripled the amount of parsley from the original and added in spinach. This came out really good.

Ingredients:

Filling:
2 boxes of of soft tofu
3 tablespoons of nutritional yeast
1 cup chopped parsley
zest from one lemon
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 bunch of spinach, chopped fine

Ravioli dough:
4 cups of white flour
4 tablespoons of olive oil
4 pinches of salt
1 cup of water.

Directions:
Filing: Drain the water from the tofu box and place the tofu on a layer of paper towels on a dish. Cover the tofu with more paper towels and place weight (I use an 18 oz can of tomatoes) on the tofu block to squeeze out the water. Let the tofu sit and drain while you prepare the other filling ingredients. Try and get as much water as possible out of the tofu before you mix the ingredients, right before mixing you can squeeze the tofu by hand or with a cheese cloth to get additional water out of it. Once prepped, place all the ingredients in a mixer and mix until well blended. There is no need to cook the spinach first, it will cook when you boil the ravioli.

Dough: Put the flour and salt in a mixer and mix to distribute the salt through the flour; we use a Kitchen Aid with the dough hook attachment. Add the olive oil and then slowly add the water. A ball of dough with then quickly form.

Use a pasta maker to roll out the dough, we use a Imperia hand cranked pasta maker. We followed the instructions that came with the maker, but found that the settings used in the instructions created too thin a sheet of dough. Next time we will use a slightly thicker setting on the pasta maker.

Lay a sheet of pasta on a clean surface and place balls of filling, about 1 inch in diameter, on the dough. Leave enough space between the balls of filling so that you can seal the dough around the filling. Lay a second sheet of pasta on top of the first, sandwiching the balls of filling. We used a pastry crimper/sealer to cut and crimp the dough to make the ravioli.