With a population of around 300,000, St. Louis is capable of producing enough toasted raviolis per day to give every single person in the city one of the breaded and deep-fried appetizers as well as a bowl of red sauce to dip it in…but what in the heck is a toasted ravioli?

A fixture on the menus of restaurants located in the long-established Italian-American neighborhood known as The Hill, toasted raviolis, or t-ravs, are also a topic of hot debate as their origin story is murkier than the nearby waters of the Mississippi. As the most popular story goes, a cook in the 1940s at a long-gone eatery called Oldani’s Restaurant was drinking red wine while making scaloppini and accidentally dropped some raviolis into the fryer.

After the cook rescued them, one of the proprietors at Oldani’s (which is now the site of Mama Campisi’s) brought the pillowy pieces of meat and dough out to the bar. They were a hit and were christened as “toasted” because the Oldanis didn’t want to use “fat fried” or “greasy fried” because of the way it would sound, according to St. Louis Magazine.

That story checks out with what chef Tom Lents, the culinary director for Aparium Hotels and the group’s Italian restaurant Lazia in nearby Kansas City, heard when he arrived in Missouri. “I love the idea that it was done by accident. You can literally go into The Hill on St. Louis and I think there are four different restaurants that claim that it’s theirs,” Lents tells InsideHook. “For me, that’s the definition of a great regional dish. Everybody wants a piece of it.  I’ve always joked, ‘How did it fall into the breadcrumbs before it was dropped into the fryer?’”

A Michigan native who spent years working in kitchens in the U.S. as well as in France, Italy, England and Ireland before finding his way back to the Midwest, Lents believes his first experience with toasted ravioli was with the variety that can sometimes be found in the supermarket freezer aisle. That experience didn’t really make much of an impression on Lents, but having an authentic version of the dish up on The Hill in St. Louis about 15 years ago did.

“It’s interesting when you find something that’s become so popular it’s become mass-produced and then you trace its origins to where the greatness really was,” he says. “Getting to eat in those restaurants and seeing the pride that they took in this world-famous toasted ravioli, I realized there was more to this than what I had ever expected. These rabbit holes where you can find meaning and history and food are what I really get excited about as a chef.”

That excitement prompted Lents and his team to intentionally experiment with dropping pasta infused with a mixture of fillings into a deep fryer over the course of six weeks in order to develop a toasted ravioli recipe for Lazia’s menu.

“We started out with a meat filling and realized relatively quickly we wanted to move to a cheese filling. It’s a provel cheese blend that doesn’t really exist outside of that area,” he says. “We played around with it and made sure you can break it apart and pull the cheese 18 inches. It had to stretch. That’s a toasted ravioli for me. We also added in a little bit of truffle to elevate it a little and give a bit more earthiness as well as add a slightly funkier element to it. Especially because of the cheese elasticity, I’d stack it up with any of them from The Hill.”

And now you can try them at home, too.

Ingredients for pasta dough: 

Directions for the pasta dough: 

Ingredients for the provel filling: 

Directions for the provel filling: 

Instructions for the ravioli: 

Ingredients for the breading: 

Directions for the breading: 

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