San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
How a single piece of pasta became one of S.F.’s most famous dishes
Cotogna’s remarkable raviolo is inspired by the indelible memory of a meal in an Italian town
The year was 1994, the dish was raviolo in a golden broth with porcinis, and the chef eating it was a young Michael Tusk.
He was on one of his first transformative trips to Italy and had wandered into a cozy restaurant called Amerigo dal 1934 in Savigno, a town famous for truffles in the hills southwest of Bologna. Nearly 30 years later, the memory of that meal remains in his brain like a footprint in mud: the pleasure of slicing into the raviolo, watching silky egg yolk ooze out and meld with the creamy mushrooms and white truffles.
When Tusk returned to California, he channeled his obsession with the dish into his own re-creation. It became what is arguably San Francisco’s most famous pasta: the raviolo di ricotta at Cotogna, the acclaimed Italian restaurant he opened with wife Lindsay Tusk 20 years ago next to his three-Michelin-starred destination Quince.
The showstopping raviolo, a gigantic, single ravioli the size of a small dessert plate, is filled with fresh, creamy ricotta and amber egg yolk that seeps out like molten lava. The 4.5-by 4.5-inch square of indulgence remains the restaurant’s calling card and most popular dish. The kitchen makes at least 80 on any given night. During the pandemic shutdown, fans who couldn’t exist without the raviolo ordered uncooked ones to make at home. Others worked tirelessly in home kitchens to re-create their own raviolo.
“If you go to Zuni and the roast chicken or Caesar salad are no longer on the menu, or R&G Lounge and the crab is suddenly not there ...” said Tusk, trailing off, as if the thought of these iconic restaurants without their iconic dishes is simply too much to bear.
Many have likely had the same thought about Cotogna’s raviolo.
Tusk actually first served the raviolo at Quince in 2003, and it has evolved over the years: It was initially a smaller, round raviolo made with a pasta cutter that gave it ridged edges. Tusk noticed diners ordering it as a second course, so he made it bigger and rectangular so there’s more pasta to soak up all the egg yolk and cheese. (He still sometimes experiments with a miniature version stuffed with a quail egg at Quince.) Sometimes, he’ll fold nettles from the Tusks’ farm in Bolinas into the filling, or spinach and a touch of nutmeg. Cooks always finish the pasta with a couple knobs of butter, browned until it gives off nutty, almost caramel-like notes, and a few squeezes of lemon juice.
Tusk isn’t sure if today’s raviolo is the largest it’s ever been, but it’s more than big enough to share with another person. It’s a perfect square, with a dimpled mound in the center hiding that alluring yolk, like a sunny-side up egg in pasta form.
For many fans, there is no Cotogna without the raviolo. Years ago, Oakland resident Ana Carolina Quintela was dating Quince’s then-executive chef, and he wanted to introduce her to Cotogna. That meant eating the raviolo. Now, when she brings first-timers to Cotogna, she always orders a raviolo for the table.
Dining enthusiast Andrew Garsetti was dumbfounded by his first raviolo experience when he moved to the Bay Area eight years ago. He’s gone back over and over again for the dish’s “guttural satisfaction.” The raviolo holds the No. 1 spot on a diligently researched, personal spreadsheet of Garsetti’s top 100 dishes in the Bay Area.
It’s “one of the greatest culinary contributions that mankind has ever seen,” Garsetti writes in the spreadsheet.
It’s a deceivingly simple dish that takes a lot of skill and practice to make. Pitfalls lurk around nearly every corner. As a highly attuned raviolo consumer, Quintela said she’s noticed slight ebbs and flows in execution when there’s staff turnover in the kitchen.
It starts with rolling out pasta dough precisely, down to the millimeter. If cooks make the top and bottom sheets separately, they run the risk of one side being thinner or thicker than the other. That leads to not only unevenly cooked pasta, but a potentially overcooked egg yolk — perhaps the cardinal sin in a dish known for its oozing insides. Tusk likes to use a micrometer, a measuring device often employed by mechanical engineers, to check down to the millimeter as he runs sheets of dough repeatedly through a pasta machine until they elongate into paper-thin scarves. (For home cooks, he recommends rolling out a single, larger piece and cutting it in half to ensure equal thickness.)
The pasta must be “delicate enough but not too delicate,” Tusk said. “It’s not too thick. It’s not too thin.”
Cooks then lay out the pasta sheets and spoon in fresh ricotta, mixed with Parmigiano Reggiano, fresh black pepper and sometimes nutmeg. They shimmy a whole, uncracked egg into the ricotta to create an indentation, then slide the yolk into its resting place. Positioning is crucial: If the bottom of the yolk isn’t fully covered by ricotta, it will overcook.
The yolk is the heart of the dish, so Tusk is constantly hunting for the most vibrant ones in California. (Really, he’d like to raise his own chickens for this dish, but mountain lions that roam near the restaurant’s farm make that risky.)
Cotogna usually uses Japanese jidori eggs, known for their darker yolks, from Chino Valley Ranchers in Southern California, though he occasionally now has to adjust given the soaring price of eggs. If Tusk is unhappy with the color of the day’s yolks, he refuses to serve the raviolo.
When it’s time to assemble the dish, cooks lay the second sheet of pasta over the top and use their thumbs and index fingers to seal the edges and squeeze out any air. Rogue air bubbles get popped with tacks. Even Tusk, after 20 years of raviolo-making, can miss an air bubble, which leads to ricotta leaking while cooking.
Tusk says the raviolo must be cooked in a gently simmering pot of salted water until al dente. Rapidly boiling water is too intense for the delicate balancing act required to evenly cook all of the raviolo’s elements. Cooks gently slide no more than three into the pot at once and monitor them closely, like giving a baby a bath. The raviolo should never flip over in the water, or else the yolk will overcook.
To check that the pasta is done, cooks carefully insert a cake tester into the ricotta only (chefs may hear “watch for the yolk!” in Tusk’s voice echoing through their heads) and touch it to the skin under their lip. If it feels warm, the raviolo is ready to be pulled and finished in browned butter and freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano.
Experienced raviolo-makers know when they’ve messed up just by looking at the color of the yolks through the pasta — it changes from molten amber to a lackluster, muted orange. The dish requires constant vigilance, even for cooks who make it regularly.
“It’s everything about cooking and technique,” Tusk said. “You have to show balance between what you’re trying to achieve.”
In a food world driven so much by fleeting trends, this is a dish with staying power. People order it again and again, Tusk said, sharing it with their children as they grow up like a family tradition.
Not everyone’s a fan, however. Some diners disavow the raviolo’s richness, a server said recently; others think the brown butter borders too much on sweetness for pasta. But still, he said, nearly every table orders the dish.
Tusk appreciates the raviolo fandom, but he’s reluctant to be so associated with a dish he didn’t create. He takes every opportunity to tell the story of that long-ago dinner at Amerigo dal 1934, and tells Cotogna raviolo fans to visit if they ever get the chance.