I’m not sure the products folks fully thought through Trader Joe’s Ricotta Cuoricini Ravioli. Because while heart-shaped pasta with a ricotta and balsamic reduction filling sounds tasty, it does leave the raviolo with a brown…protuberance in the middle. After someone on Reddit said they looked like tongues in the package, I couldn’t unsee it.
I mean…you see it, right?
So we had to do something to cover it up. I decided on beet pesto to stay with the pink/red hearts theme. My beet pesto recipe is designed to be tossed with half a pound of farfalle, so if you decide to use it, you’re going to enough leftover for another meal, just warning you. I usually roast the beets in the oven, but this time I used TJ’s steamed baby beets in the produce section. It creates a wetter pesto, but otherwise worked well.
So here are the little hearts with a couple of teaspoons of pesto on each one, topped with grated Parmiggiano Reggiano and a tiny bit of minced Italian parsley for color. They look cute, right? But I gotta tell ya, I think the ravioli themselves are fine, nothing amazing. The pasta is nice and thin, but the filling didn’t have a lot of wow factor for me. You get some sweetness from the balsamic, but there’s not much more to say about it. I have another photo of the pasta cut in half, so you could see the texture of the balsamic reduction, but it looked even more like a tongue, so I’m sparing you.
Let’s get close. See, as long as you flip over the ravioli you can cover up the brown square on each one with the pesto. I didn’t dare try to toss it with the pesto, I’m sure it would have been a mess. So, sure it’s cute for Valentine’s Day, but it’s not something I need to buy again.
A few more Valentine’s items were in at my TJ’s, so I updated the Valentine’s Goodies Roll In at Trader Joe’s post with a few more photos.
Check out some other We Tried’s from Trader Joe’s: