Are you ready for an international table? Today, we’re making lobster ravioli and pairing it with Albariño. Our wine is from Spain, recipe from Italy and ingredients from Atlantic Canada. Let’s see how we’ll bring three cultures together on a single meal.

Our calendar is showing that it’s a perfect day to enjoy this aged Albariño from Rías Baixas and the ideal pairing idea follows the wine: A dish where Italian cuisine would meet Nova Scotian products – ravioli filled with lobster and ricotta, served with lemon butter sauce.

Lobster Ravioli

Making pasta from scratch is not the easiest thing to do, but it’s worth all the time and effort. I use an Italian recipe which I trust and make for years. It’s a basic pasta recipe with only 2 ingredients: 400 grams of 00 pasta flour and 4 eggs. You can use this dough for all the types of the pasta; spaghetti, pappardelle, farfalle… and this time for ravioli.

After the dough is ready, we’ll fill them with Nova Scotia lobster. For the filling, we need 400 grams of cooked lobster meat, 250 grams of ricotta and 2 medium sized shallots, with some seasoning of salt and black pepper. Sautee the shallots to have some more flavor and mix all the ingredients to have a nice and creamy filling.

The difficult part of making the ravioli is to pay attention to not leaving any air in between the dough, while you’re closing the layers up – it’s not very easy but some patience and experience will help it out. Another important note is not to make this while you’re hungry because as the patience decreases with hunger, so the air in the raviolis increases – I know this from experience.

Once the raviolis are ready, cook them in boiled water – once they are ready, they start to float in the water. Meanwhile, prepare the sauce. It’s a very simple sauce with some butter, white wine and cream, seasoned with lemon zest. Here, the hint is to use organic lemons, if you happen to use normal lemons, you may end up with a very bitter flavor.

Wine pairing: Albariño

Looking at a nice bottle of wine that I’ve bought last year from Spain… I’ve chosen this bottle, from thousands of options in the wine store, and brought it back to Nova Scotia. To be honest, the selection was not very difficult, since I was searching for an Albariño wine from Rías Baixas, and this wine had a special character to it: La Comtesse from Pazo Barrantes winery. It’s made from grapes of old vines planted in 1965 and it was aged in French oak for six months before released to the market. Only 7119 bottles were produced from this wine, and this is the bottle numbered 2881.

This Albariño was everything that I have imagined from an aged white wine from old vines – it had a brilliant gold color, with a very complex nose; lemons, apricots, jasmine, honeysuckle and some lactic notes… On the palate, it was dry with a balanced acidity and alcohol, and it had a creamy texture with a long finish.

Ricotta and lobster filled raviolis with lemon butter sauce made an outstanding pairing to this wine. The unctuosity of the wine combined very well with the creaminess of the ravioli filling and butter.

It was an enjoyable international table, wine from Spain, recipe from Italy and ingredients from Atlantic Canada! It’s difficult to not to love bringing cultures together on a single meal.

Cheers,

Nesli

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Categories: Wine & Food, WinesTags: Food, wine food pairing, Wines