Asparagus Ravioli

On the flour: plain flour (00 if your shop stocks it, but ordinary plain flour works — this isn't a dish that needs semolina's chew, since you want a sheet that folds and seals, not one that fights back). The eggs do double duty, binding the dough and giving it that pale yellow colour and slight richness; if you're short an egg, a splash of water will bring the dough together but you lose a little of that silkiness, so don't make a habit of it.

Asparagus: buy it with tight, closed tips and stalks that snap rather than bend when fresh — a stalk that bends like rubber has been sitting too long and will taste of water, not of itself. Trimming "the tougher parts" means snapping off the woody base by hand rather than cutting with a knife; the stalk will naturally break where the fibre turns tender, which a blade can't judge for you. Out of season, good frozen asparagus tips are a fair substitute for the filling, though you'll want to pat them properly dry after thawing — back to that same water problem.

Ricotta is there for lightness and a neutral dairy base that lets the asparagus taste of itself rather than of cheese; "well drained" is doing real work in this recipe, not a throwaway instruction — tip it into a sieve lined with kitchen paper and let it sit while you do everything else, and you'll save yourself a burst seam later. If ricotta isn't to hand, a well-drained cottage cheese blitzed smooth, or curd cheese, does the same structural job, though the flavour shifts slightly tangier.

Grana Padano and Parmesan are both hard, aged, salty cheeses and here they're interchangeable in spirit — Grana Padano is simply the cheaper cousin, aged less long, which is exactly why Italian households default to it for everyday cooking and save Parmesan for where it's the star. Use whichever you have; the nutmeg pinch is the traditional partner to ricotta-and-greens fillings specifically because it cuts the slight flatness that dairy and asparagus together can have — a small amount, it should be felt rather than tasted.

The butter-and-asparagus-tip finish at the end is a plain emulsified sauce, not a reduction — melted butter clinging to the pasta water that comes off the ravioli as you transfer them is what gives it a gloss rather than a greasy slick, so don't fully drain the ravioli before they go into that pan. Any neutral oil with no smell of its own can stand in for the olive oil used to soften the onion and asparagus in step four, but butter at the end is worth keeping as butter — it's there for its dairy flavour and its ability to cling to pasta, which a flavourless oil won't do.

On the rolling: a pasta machine does the job a mattarello and an Italian grandmother's forearm used to do by hand, and there's no shame in the machine — it exists precisely because hand-rolling pasta this thin, evenly, across a whole batch, is genuinely hard graft, and the machine is just an industrial-age shortcut to the same physics of stretching gluten. Pass the dough through several times, folding it back on itself between the wider settings, because that's what actually builds the elasticity — jumping straight to the thinnest setting just tears a dough that hasn't been worked enough.

A plate with a damp tea towel over it, in place of the lid your pan doesn't have, keeps the cut ravioli from drying and cracking at the edges while you work through the rest of the dough — a dry edge won't seal, however hard you press it. And patience is the real ingredient in the whole exercise: the dough resting, the filling cooling, working through the sheets steadily rather than rushing to get dinner on sooner than the dough is ready to behave. Rush any one of those three and you'll taste it in a split seam, not in the finished plate.