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!
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