Alinea at Home: Black Truffle Explosions

So, I was doing well, then life got busy again.  Anyway, I got really excited for this dish after I had it at Alinea.  Turns out, I should really leave some things to professionals.  So here we go.

I don't know exactly what happened to the first picture but this is the start of the dish.  This mixture includes, black truffle juice, salt, butter and a couple of gelatin sheets.  This whole mixture was used to make the filling of the ravioli.  I poured the mixture into shallow bowls and let it chill for a while.

The start of the pasta dough.  "00" Flour.  This is a special flour that is much higher in gluten than other flours it supposedly  makes really good pasta.  We also have eggs, milk, olive oil and a bit of cornmeal.  So normally when I make pasta I make Italian grandmothers turn in their graves because I use a mixer.  This time I actually did the well method.  This is where you push the flour to the side, pour the liquid in and then swirl things around until all the ingredients come together. 

This is the completed pasta dough.  Once it got to this point I let it rest four about 45 minutes. 

I busted out the pasta machine for the first time in a while and rolled out the dough.  I probably should have rolled it through one more level.  More on that in a bit.

So here are the completed raviolis (before going into the boiling water) and the toppings, parmesan and black truffles. 

The final plate.  It was good, naturally not as good as the restaurant version.  For two primary reasons.  I didn't either roll the dough thing enough or cook it long enough and the truffles I got were obviously crap.  You can tell because they are a solid peanut butter color on the inside not sort of white with veins.  The picture below is what this looked like at the restaurant.