Gnocchi - An Experiment

I love gnocchi, and I always thought it looked a little...well...scary to make. So I did a bunch of research and settled on combining a few different recipes that I found. They are all pretty much the same ratios of ingredients. I really like the techniques on 101 Cookbooks, which has an extremely helpful tutorial. I did make a few changes, adding salt and finely crushed telicherry pepper to the dough, as well as using a potato ricer to deconstruct my potatoes. I used medium-sized russets and cut them in half prior to boiling.

It turns out that I may have used more than 2 lbs of potatoes, as called for in the recipe, because my kitchen scale decided to run out of juice. I had to add a bit more flour, about 1/3 cup extra, but they turned out just fine.

The Recipe

2 lbs baking potatoes

1 cup flour

1 egg, beaten

salt

finely ground pepper

(note: I added a little treat to half the dough, see below)

First, you'll want to thoroughly wash your potatoes, cut in half and put them in a large pot with salted cold water. Bring to a boil and continue boiling until they are thoroughly cooked. Once cooked, push through potato ricer OR remove skins and mash up by fork.

Allow the potatoes to cool for about 15-20 minutes. Stir in egg and sifted flour.

I found that it was much easier to mix this all together by hand instead of using a spoon. Do not use a heavy hand while mixing, though, because you don't want these to end up sticky. My dough looked something like this:

Once your dough is ready, take a handful and roll it out on a floured surface. My roll was about 1 inch thick. Once you have rolled out the dough, cut into small pieces. Mine started out at about 1 inch, but I made them smaller as I went on. After they are cut into pieces, roll them on the tines of a fork to make them cute. In the research that I did for this recipe, I did find that many people just roll them into a half-football shape. This is perfectly acceptable and is probably easier than the fork-tine method.

After I made about 100 plain gnocchi (yes, this recipe makes a LOT of gnocchi!) I decided that I wanted to mix things up a bit. So, I went to my trusty Aerogarden and harvested some basil. I then chopped it up and mixed it in the dough. These were really good and I will definitely be experimenting in the future with other flavors.

I rolled them out in the same manner. Once I finished, I had *plenty* of gnocchi, so I packed up some to freeze. I will let you know later how those turn out.

To cook these gnocchi, I used the same water that I boiled the potatoes in, brought to a rapid boil, dropped them in, and removed as soon as they floated to the top. I then put them in a colander to drain while I heated up some butter in a skillet. This idea was from Giada de Laurentis' book Everyday Pasta for making crispy gnocchi. I don't really know if I will do this method again because, quite frankly, they were too rich, and they kind of stuck to the pan. I then drizzled homemade pesto all over the entire batch and let me just tell you...these were *really* good. Perfectly pillowy in my mouth, great flavor, great texture. The only thing I will do differently next time is abandon the pan-frying method and just put the pesto on them as soon as they are done.

Final Verdict: Totally time consuming (took about 3 hours start to finish) but DEFINITELY worth it. The final cost for about 3 lbs of gnocchi came to roughly $1, which is a huge value over the ones I buy at a delightful little pastaria in Boulder at $5.99/lb. And they taste better.

Valuable Lesson Learned: do NOT...I repeat...do NOT pile raw gnocchi on paper plates. They stick. Use baking sheets instead. I think this might have been my fault, because they shouldn't have been sticky anyway, but I used too many potatoes. To freeze I arranged them in a single layer on a paper plate, separating each layer with parchment paper, and put them in a gallon-sized freezer bag.

High Altitude Adjustment: none.