Pilgrim on the Path: Gnocchi

Pilgrim on the Path: Gnocchi


We were an Italian restaurant’s worst nightmare. A father-daughter team compulsive (borderline neurotic) about not having cheese with seafood (despite this “taboo” breaking down rapidly in Italy itself and the Italian diaspora as people realize how compatible good parmesan is with some seafood dishes), and me, compulsive (borderline neurotic) about not having eggs/egg yolks in potato gnocchi as they render the product gummy/gluey. But the waitress at the newish storefront place in downtown quaint and/or historic Sunderland Massachusetts never flinched. She consulted the chef and collected all the points on offer on both items.


As I waded through my gnocchi, said daughter (now working toward a degree in foods and cooking) inquired about my gnocchi recipe, as her last batch had critical structural flaws that rendered them incoherent on cooking. I tell her I’ll make a batch and send her the recipe and how-to photos.


That was 6 or 7 months ago. I made the gnocchi, took the photos, wrote out the recipe. And it’s all still sitting here on the hard drive. Let’s smack this baby’s bow with a bottle of cheap sparkling wine, pop open a better bottle for drinking, and launch. 


First, every recipe you find for gnocchi is going to tell you to boil the potatoes. And every recipe you find is wrong. You want starchy potatoes, and you want to bake them in a hot oven until they are nice and fluffy. This means making sure you stab them with a fork while they’re baking, and then pop them open when they’re done so the flesh won’t steam. For the demo batch for this article, I used 3 big bakers.

Fluffy baked potato just

prior to being turned into

gnocchi dough.

Scoop the fluffy, non-steamed flesh out of the potato skins. If you have bacon, cheddar cheese, a little mustard, some Old Bay in the house, use them to make stuffed potato skins. Otherwise, nibble them while you work, slathering them with unsalted butter and plenty of salt and pepper. 

Here are all the ingredients you

need to make fabulous potato

gnocchi. Note that there are NO EGGS

here. Eggs are good for Roman (semolina)

and other more exotic gnocchi. They are

not good for simple potato gnocchi.

In the bowl in which you will mix the gnocchi, cut with a pastry harp or fork (do not mix with a spoon) the potato into a fluffy heap. Add a less-than-equal (to the potatoes) volume of all-purpose flour. The relative amount is something of a matter of feel. If the potatoes are moist, you need more. I suggest you start with 2/3 the volume by rough-eye guesstimate. Salt and pepper, light on the former, heavy on the latter. 

The potatoes in their bowl with

all-purpose flour plus salt and pepper.

Knead the flour and potatoes together a few times. Your objective is to get a mass that will hold together but remain tender. This means you need to knead it enough, but not too much. I’m not sure what else to do to get you over this hump. I will suggest this—much like bread making, this is one time when you’re probably better to over-knead at least a little.

The kneaded bolus of potatoes

and flour. Basically, you’re lookin’

at your gnocchi right here.

Put this bowl into your refrigerator for at least an hour or so. Maybe up to a day. I wouldn’t go much longer than that. The potatoes will darken and you’re gnocchi will be oddly colored. Although other than the color, they’ll still be good (we’ll talk sauces in a little while).


OK. Haul the mass out of the frig. Now, if you want to be authentically Italian, you are supposed to make the gnocchi small—maybe the size of the last phalange of your pinky. Each one is supposed to have a crater on  one side, and a series of ridges on the other. The approved technique for this is to pinch off each little piece of dough, press it against the back of a dinner fork to make the crater, and roll it down the tines of the fork to make the ridges. Then you pinch off the next little piece of dough, press it, roll it, etc.


Personally, I don’t have the patience for this crap. Nor do I like little tiny honeybee-pupa-sized gnocchi. I like my gnocchi to have some heft, and to not have been handled to death. I pinch ‘em and press ‘em into disks about the size of the last phalange of my thumb. With a little crater on  one side. Think of it as my homage to tradition.

Gnocchi specimen ready to cook.

To cook these babies, you want a shallow expanse of simmering, salted water. Drop in the dumplings at a density low enough so they don’t stack up—you want to keep them separate.

Gnocchi cooking.

Traditionally (go back to that recipe book) the word is that when the gnocchi float back to the surface, they are done. Frankly, I think they’re a little under-done at that point (I don’t like my macaroni pasta all that al dente either, so I may not be the best—or at least the most mainstream—judge). I cook ‘em another minute or two.


As you skim them out of the simmering pot, slip them into a baking dish, either with melted butter or your pre-prepared sauce. 


Almost any pasta sauce is good with gnocchi. I like something that lets the potato flavor come through. That means something on the lighter, not-red side. What Italians call “white”. Which means anything without tomatoes. For these gnocchi I made a sauce with roasted sliced onions and mushrooms (little brown ones usually called “Baby Bellas” at my market), slivers of smoked ham, plenty of butter, salt, pepper and fresh thyme. When it was all ready to rock in the big roasting pan I poured in a slug—a big slug, maybe 100 mls—of inexpensive sweet sherry. I let the alcohol cook out, slipped in the gnocchi, grated some drifts of Parmesan Reggiano over it, and served it up. 

Gnocchi in the sauce.

Gnocchi in the sauce close up.

Awesome. We ate nearly the whole batch for dinner, and Molly took the remainder to work the next day for lunch. 


PS. You can add some heavy cream, sour cream, or cream cheese to that sauce if you like things a little more baroque. Also, if you use bacon instead of ham, you’ll have a very different, but still simple and maybe even more delicious sauce. Have at it!


PPS. If you have a little time available, don't forget to surf on over to  http://docviper.livejournal.com/ and 
 http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/


Thanks for stopping by!

We Got Yer Bisque Right Here

The Big Guy on the Taiga shifted his venue to the steamy pine-and-cattle country of east Texas hard against the petroleum-and-hurricane-ridden Gulf of Mexico coast. You gotta go a ways offshore in the tropical ocean to get to Homarus americanus territory. Pretty much across the Florida peninsula and out onto the Atlantic continental slope, I’m guessing. As we’ve been deep in the Big Guy’s debt all these years, I offered to ship him turkey and beef sandwiches with stuffing, cranberry sauce, gravy and mayo nonstop to Houston. Be that as it may, we managed to build a bisque on the back of a couple buckets of oysters carried most providently across the Bay Bridge by elements of the Eastern Shore Army.

You can do this with raw oysters, of course. On the other hand, you can do it a bit more easily, and with a touch more flavor, if you roast the oysters until they open on an open fire, then compile the meats and liquors into a small bowl. We ended up going both routes at once.

This one’s about as simple and delicious as food gets. A little rich, perhaps. But remember that this is the low-fat, high-fiber, favorable glycemic index version. Warp out!

Make a medium white sauce. For the 25 or so we had hammering the bisque this year, I used, I believe, 3 sticks of unsalted butter, a heap of flour, and good low-sodium turkey broth (only in the market for a few holiday weeks, make use of it when you can), about 2/3 to 1/3 with milk. Let this simmer for a while while the Oyster Preparation Subcommittee does their thing out at the fire pit. As it simmers, put in a handful of fresh thyme still on the branches, plenty of ground pepper, and salt as needed. It will thicken up beautifully as it steeps.

When the oysters and their liquor are in hand, put plenty of sweet sherry into the soup. I use lots, probably a half liter for the 3 or 4 liters of bisque base. When the alcohol cooks out of the sherry, add the oysters (snipped into fragments with a scissors if large) and their liquid. When it’s all hot, fish out the thyme stems, top it with more pepper and some sweet paprika and serve it up. Goes well with oyster crackers spiced heavily with a touch of olive oil and plenty of Old Bay. I like the Old Bay better on the crackers for this. The bisque itself is such a beautifully clear flavor that there’s no sense mucking it up.

  

Fruit Bombs With Screw Caps

“Here you go, sir. Over here!” the slender, attractive, 35-ish woman waved to me. This enthusiastic sort of greeting is not the kind of thing I’m used to in the context of slender, attractive 35-ish women, even when they are check-out clerks at the Wine and Beer Superstore. So I asked her what’s up.

“I’m covered with poison ivy” she says. “Whenever things get slow here, I hear all these voices telling me to scratch, scratch, scratch. So I’m trying to get all the customers I can so I don’t shred myself bloody.” The enthusiasm makes more sense in THIS context.

I suggest cortisone cream. She says she’s got cortisone cream, antihistamine cream, benadryl tablets, calamine lotion, ice, epsom salts, prayer beads, and a statue of St. Christopher in her car. Her plan is to drink heavily when she gets off work.

Anyway. Robert M. Parker is my hero. Started his career as a hard-working staff attorney, killing himself with long hours, low pay, and mind-numbingly trivial tasks.  Realized he had to find a way out. Invested in a couple dozen bottles of first-rate wine, tasted them all, scribbled out some notes, self-published, sold subscriptions to a regular series of wine tasting notes, and never looked back.

Parker has championed a signature style of wine for his entire career. Concentrated, dense, aromatic, rich, powerfully balanced between syrup and tongue-tingling tannin and other acids. Parker’s preferences have been called “fruit bombs” by other critics, and often ridiculed. Oz Clark, otherwise egalitarian and down-to-earth wine writer, carps constantly about Parker’s influence and claims that viticultural practices designed to meet Parker’s specs are destroying a tradition of wine that tastes of its geography, or “terroir”.

I don’t know about that. It seems to me that there is likely to be as much bullshit in Clark’s claiming that specific combinations of soil, slope, aspect, precipitation, temperature, humidity, and other vinicultural (uh oh. I just realized that in the paragraph immediately above, I used the term “viticultural”. In this paragraph, I used “vinicultural”. And I’m not sure that either is actually incorrect. I just yanked Parker’s first book, a 1985 guide to Bordeaux off the shelf. He uses “viticulture”. Although it would take a lot more digging than I can do at the moment to be certain he doesn’t also use “vini” somewhere.) parameters yield some kind of consistently recognizable wine flavor as Parker’s default preferences for concentration and fruit.

But here’s the thing. Parker’s kind of wine is absolutely phenomenally unquestionably delicious. Addictive. Tongue-coating, mouth-warming, sweet-scented. Boston, say, or The Temptations, vs. The Velvet Underground or Pere Ubu.

For a long time, for almost all the time wine has been made, in fact, the concentrated fruit syrups Parker favors were hard to make, harder to come by, and really really hard to afford. When vinicultural technology was more primitive, Fruit Bombs came along once-in-a-decade if you were lucky, when rainy spring and sunny summer and dry autumn combined to yield grapes of massive sugar, massive acid, and massive complexity. This was why Chateau Lafite Rothschild or Chateau Petrus in Bordeaux could sell for $150 a bottle in some years and $750 in others. Because “years” really mattered, and there were only a few, very few, spots on the surface of the earth that could produce these wines even every once in a while.

Now? Well, among the many reasons that living in the present is a wonderful thing is the fact that wine-making technology has advanced. To the point where Robert M. Parker fruit bombs are now available in the $10 to $20 range. And, as I challenge the staff of my local “wine and beer superstore” weekend after weekend, “fruit bombs for $20 with screw caps” are abundant if you can sort ‘em out.

That’s right, screw caps. The ONLY rational wine closure technology. Corks are an artifact of times long gone. And were, even then, imperfect and compromised. I believe they replaced the Grecco-Roman methods, which involved rags, wax, and adulteration of the wine itself with preservatives.

If you need to convince yourself of the wisdom of technological advancement, you can put together an interesting little tasting. Hit your local shop and grab a couple of bottles of Retsina--Greek wine with terpentine-like preservatives added in continuation of the ancient tradition. Retsinas are getting harder and harder to find. Mostly because modern winemaking and wine-closing techniques allow even the Macedonian hinterlands to yield credible, storable wines without the need for terps. And, it turns out, people generally prefer quality wines without added solvents. Go figure.

Next, get yourself a couple bottles of sweet red wines from California and/or France. The latter may be called something like “Vin Doux Naturel”, although for most it’s marketing gloss--sweet red wines are generally produced artificially.

Finally, get a couple of cheap sherry-style wines, say one from California and one from New York State. The oxidized flavor that is the first, and possibly least, impairment of ineffectively stored wines is perfectly represented here. Nothing wrong with sherry, of course, even cheap sherry-like wines. It’s just that if all wine tastes like that, it’ll be a real bummer.

And that, my friends, is why you want screw caps on ALL your wine. Solvents, sugar, and aerobic degradation are just the start of the vinicultural contortions needed to make outmoded closure technologies viable. So do YOUR part to advance wine into the 2010s (at least as far as the 2010s last. cf the Mayan Long Count Calendar and the End O’ The World™ presently scheduled for the 21 December 2012). Buy wines with screw cap closures. Even Robert M. Parker Fruit Bombs™. I’ll be in line just ahead of you.