This Viral Method For Making Store-Bought Ravioli Creates A Delicious Meal With No Dirty Dishes

Although boiling water is king, there are plenty of ways to make pasta. Some varieties, like lasagna and ziti, are famously baked. Anything prepared al cartoccio, like a simple spaghetti or a seafood linguine feast, is cooked in an encasement like parchment paper for maximum moisture. Aluminum foil is also sometimes used, so the viral ravioli packets you might have seen circling social media actually hark back to a classic Italian cooking technique.

Of course, the best of those al cartoccio recipes are unlikely to rely on supermarket pasta, jarred sauce, and cheese of ignoble provenance, but it's fun to mix mediums now and then. The newfound appeal of the foil packs is also primarily in their tidiness, so dirtying a pot with whole darn tomato sauce or gravy would kind of defeat the purpose in this case. Instead, everything sits snugly inside of its chrome envelope like a carbohydrate birthday card that you can eat.

The easiest foil packet ravioli relies on the marvels of modern manufacturing, vacuum sealing, and refrigeration for maximum convenience. In other words, you just toss the grocery store ravioli and the mass-produced bolognese, marinara, or what have you on a large sheet of aluminum foil, top it with some cheese (the obvious choice being mozzarella), pack it up tight, and bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 15 minutes until it's ready. Remove to a plate and you've got a pretty proper meal and very few dishes to wash. You can, of course, pack in more foil ravioli perks, too.

You can make any store-bought pasta sauce taste homemade with a few shakes of the herbs and spices you likely already have in the cabinet. You can also increase your cheese quotient with a little Parmesan or Grana Padano, which will add a bit of crisp texture in the former case, thanks to Parm's resistance to melting, and nicely creamy in the latter because of GP's silken quality. A little bit of MSG will also go a long, flavorful way, just like it does with spaghetti sauce.