My Favorite Dish: Rosina’s Raviolo al’ Uovo

Andrew Dominick December 29, 2022

I’ll be the first to admit that since Rosina’s opened, it has become my toxic trait. And I mean that in the best way possible. I’ve eaten there for dinner, I’ve attended several happy hours and one industry night, and I’ve celebrated a birthday there.

Full transparency, Jared Falco, Rosina’s co-owner and executive chef, is a good friend of mine. I’d like to say I go so often to visit him, and that is partially true, but Jared, I’m sorry, it’s for the pasta. Still love you, bro!

This year, I think I’ve eaten my weight in ziti with spicy vodka sauce, squid ink malloreddus, tortellini en brood, a few off-menu spaghetti dishes (thanks, chef!), and a few hearty bowls of rigatoni with braised pork and white beans.

But it’s the pasta appetizer BEFORE the main pasta dishes that always gets me. It’s creamy ricotta center. It’s got a rich, warm, reddish orange egg yolk runniness when you cut into it. It’s buttery. It’s truffle-y. And the pasta is this perfect balance of silky with a little chew.

I’m talking about the raviolo al’ uovo.

Each raviolo that are about as big as a souvenir sand dollar and packed as thick as a Reese’s Big Cup with homemade ricotta—a blend of sheep’s and cow’s milk—and an egg yolk as bright as the summer sun.

Perfect ball of pasta dough. Keep on scrolling for the process!

I’ve tried a few iterations of it, one with leeks, another with salt cured egg yolk shaved on top. Each, though, came out with a fresh shaved black truffle finish. Since it debuted on the menu, I’ve gotten it every single time. And when I’m not at Rosina’s about to have one, it’s the dish I daydream about doing random everyday tasks. Addiction? Yeah. I’m an addict.

As if I didn’t appreciate it enough, I asked Jared and chef de cuisine—and one of only two people at Rosina’s that can assemble the raviolo—David Guimares to talk about its inspiration and to take me behind the scenes of how it’s made from start to the part when we all take a yolky, truffle-y forkful of some of the best pasta you’ll have in Connecticut.

“It’s inspired by Grant Achatz and this one bite truffle situation that he has,” Falco explains. “It’s like a raviolo that comes on a wonton spoon with black truffle. It’s like a truffle explosion in your mouth. That was what we talked about before we put our version on the menu.”

For Falco, the most important part of the raviolo was being able to make it fresh daily being that Rosina’s ethos is fresh pasta, by hand, daily. But he thinks the cheese and the truffle are two very important components to the dish.

“We’re not using truffle pate or oil, it’s a real truffle from Urbani and if we don’t use them, we use Nunzia,” he says. “The truffles are what’s key for whipping into the cheese. And we use a three-year aged imported parmesan Reggiano, and a pecorino mixed into the ricotta as well, so it’s got a lot of umami in there.”

Guimares then chimed in.

“It’s all in the dough,” he says. “It’s a super simple dish. Anyone could make it at home if they had the ingredients. The pasta dough, too. The eggs are important for the texture.”

Falco picked up off of that.

“If we’re talking semantics and technique, yeah, the dough is the most important part,” he says. “We can tell by looking at pictures now that a certain pasta dough isn’t it. The texture, the way it cooks. You can tell by looking as pasta if they put too much water in it. What type of egg yolks they use, whether they’re dark or light. We experimented with all different kinds of eggs.”

Then Guimares started doing his thing on the bench. He calls it a finicky process, but you’d never know it to watch him work.

He quickly hand mixes high quality flour with eggs that I won’t even tell you where they’re from in the U.S. as to preserve some secrets. Out comes a smooth, deep yellow, almost orange ball. It’s wrapped, rested, then rolled out a few times for a perfect thickness (or thinness, rather). That ricotta truffle mixture is piped down like a snake with an emptiness meant to house a golden yolk. Another pasta sheet is placed over top of that one before each raviolo is cut and lightly dusted with semolina.

From there it’s a straightforward cook. Frying pan on a high flame, salty pasta water, and butter. The raviolo gets shimmied around and basted for barely a couple of minutes, then it’s placed into a shallow dish, a few spoonful’s of that pan butter/salt water mixture over the top, and before it hits your table, a liberal shaving of pungent black truffle. Cut into it with your fork, the yolk oozes out, scoop it up shovel style as to get plenty of truffle in each bite. It’s bliss.

Big thanks to Jared and David for fulfilling my raviolo curiosity. But my obsession, my constant craving for their raviolo al’ uovo? After the behind the scenes look at the process, I have more appreciation for it, and my hankering for it is bigger than it ever was.