Baked Toasted Ravioli

Hello all!
Last night I was feeling very nostalgic and missing home so I decided to try to find a recipe for Toasted Ravioli. This is another St. Louis specialty and is so darn good I get it any chance I can. The only issue I have is that they are usually fried and I'm not a big fan of frying if I can help it. For me frying is just too darn messy and I tend to burn myself nearly every time I fry foods. My poor hands are pocked with burns from grease so I try to avoid it. If you must fry, I highly recommend using an apparatus that you can plug in and then do so outside so you don't get all that oil in the air and layering your kitchen with it not to mention the smell that goes along with it. For me we use an OLD electric skillet that was bequeathed to us by Matt's Aunt Mary (I know! The man came with a bunt pan AND an electric skillet! It was love at first rummage through his kitchen, lol! The best part is he had no idea how to use either!). But since I try to avoid frying for health reasons as well, I shot for a recipe that baked the ravioli.
As a per-cursor, I have made ravioli from scratch and although its not difficult and you have the freedom to do all sorts of wonky flavors (spinach ravioli with feta, kalamata olives and oregano, or Pumpkin with panchetta apples and butternut squash), it is very time consuming, so thankfully this recipe uses pre-made frozen ravioli. I will try to remember to do a "Ravioli from scratch" tutorial on here one day, but until then, lets just go with:
(Here is the original link: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/breaded-toasted-ravioli/)

Baked Toasted Ravioli

Ingredients

• 1 egg white
• 1 teaspoon water
• 1 cup bread crumbs
• 2 teaspoon dried Italian seasoning
• 2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese
• 1 (25 ounce) package cheese and/or beef ravioli, thawed if frozen
• cooking spray

 

Preheat an oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Place a wire rack on a baking sheet.

Beat together the egg white and water in a small bowl. 

You can't see it, but there is water in that teaspoon

See the discolored circle? That's where the water landed

Whisk whisk whisk!

Mix bread crumbs, oregano, basil, and Parmesan cheese in a large bowl. 

Dip each ravioli in the beaten egg, and then roll in the bread crumb mixture. 

Flippin the ravioli over in the egg white

Adding it to the bread crumb mixture

Tada! All covered!

Spray both sides of breaded ravioli with cooking spray; 

As I finished the ravioli, I put them on a plate so I could just spray a bunch with cooking spray at one time

Spray one side of the ravioli, then flip them and spray the other side. This will help the ravioli's toast without frying. Matt did this very well! It looks like shake and bake... and he helped!

This is what you have left from making 24 ravioli, so you could probably do 2 more, but not much over that

Place on the wire rack. 

So we did Raviolis on a wire rack on a cookie sheet that way if anything falls off (which it did see the crumbs??) they get caught on the cookie sheet rather than burning in your oven

Bake breaded ravioli in preheated oven until golden brown and crispy, 15 to 25 minutes.  

Look how nicely toasted!!!

Is your mouth watering yet??? Mine is!

Look how pretty!

Mmmm! Cheese ravioli! Nice white ricotta and Parmesan!

Meat ravioli! Nom nom nom!

Things learned from this recipe... If you use Panko bread crumbs you need to run them through the food processor because they're too chunky. They worked, but would have been better as a finer meal. Second, this was insanely easy and totally made me miss home just a smidgen less. Anyone can do this recipe, there was absolutely nothing technically difficult about it and in fact you don't even need to chop anything! The original recipe called for only dried basil and oregano, but since I didn't have dried basil (only fresh and frozen...) I went with Italian seasoning and it was great!

This recipe made 24 ravioli so you may have to scale up or down depending on how many people you want to feed. I personally chose to use both beef and cheese ravioli because I thought it would be nice to have variety, but if you're strictly vegetarian, you can go just cheese or if you're a hard core carnivore you can go for just the meat ravioli, or do both like I did!
Happy eating!