Ravioli with Gorgonzola Sauce

The flour split — durum and plain, half and half — isn't fussiness, it's physics. Durum is high-protein, high-gluten, the flour pasta factories use because it gives a dough that holds its shape and a bite that doesn't go to mush. Plain flour on its own would give you dough too soft to roll thin without tearing; durum on its own, by hand, can fight you and crack. Together you get dough that's strong enough to roll paper-thin and still elastic enough to seal. If you only have plain flour in the cupboard, use it — just expect slightly softer pasta, and don't try to roll it as thin as you would the mix.

Four eggs plus a spoon of olive oil is doing the job that water would do in cheaper dried pasta — eggs give fat and protein that make the dough rich, yellow, and tender rather than just starchy. The oil is there to stop the dough being dry and crumbly at the kneading stage; a pinch more or less flour depending on egg size is normal, eggs aren't a fixed volume. Chilling the dough for an hour isn't about food safety, it's about the gluten relaxing — knead dough and it fights back when you try to roll it; rest it and it goes slack and co-operative. Skip the rest and you'll find yourself wrestling the pasta machine.

Chanterelles are named because they're good, not because they're required — any mushroom that holds its shape when fried works, chestnut mushrooms from the supermarket are a fair stand-in and nobody will complain. What matters is frying them hot and hard enough that the water they release evaporates rather than pools, which is the only way to get concentrated mushroom flavour instead of a wet, pale version of it. Butter rather than oil here because butter browns and carries flavour into the mushroom as it cooks — oil just lubricates.

Ricotta is the filling's base because it's mild and loose enough to bind garlic, walnut, parsley and mushroom without fighting any of them for attention — a strong cheese would drown out the chanterelles you just worked to get right. Walnuts, finely chopped, add bite against all that softness; parsley and garlic are there raw-ish, folded in off the heat, to keep some freshness against the cooked, buttery mushroom.

For the sauce, "blue cheese" and "gorgonzola" in the name aren't the same promise — true gorgonzola, especially the dolce version, is softer and milder than a lot of British blue, so if you use a sharp Stilton expect a stronger, saltier sauce, and taste before you add extra salt. Double cream, specifically, because its higher fat content is what lets it take the heat and the cheese's salt without curdling — lighter cream is more likely to split under that combination. The rocket at the end isn't decoration so much as correction: bitter leaf against rich cheese sauce, cutting it the way you'd want a squeeze of lemon to cut something fried.

Some say ravioli has to be cut into neat identical circles with a proper cutter to be "real" — no, because what the shape is actually protecting against is uneven sealing. A fork-pinched edge or a rough square holds filling in just as well as a fluted circle; restaurants use cutters for photographs, not for flavour. What you can't skip is pressing the air out before you seal — trapped air makes the ravioli puff and then split in the boiling water, same failure as a filling that's too wet, different cause.

And three and a half minutes in boiling, salted water is a floor, not a clock to watch — fresh pasta this thin cooks fast, and the real sign is the ravioli rising and looking slightly swollen and translucent at the edges, not a timer going off. Pull one out and bite it if you're unsure. That's not cheating, that's how you learn what three and a half minutes actually looks like in your own pot.