Potato gnocchi

I promised in my last post, about homemade tomato sauce, that I’d soon write about the gnocchi I made to go with the sauce.  I’m overdue in sharing.

The truth is, I started making the gnocchi with the thought of writing about how easy it was, how it seems so intimidating but really it’s a breeze, how I don’t know why everyone doesn’t make them all the time.  Then I made them, and it simply wasn’t so.  These things were kind of a pain in the ass.  A tasty pain, but still a pain.

None of the steps are very hard, or complex, or finicky.  That’s a benefit: there’s very little chance you could mess these up.  It might take an afternoon, and they might not be pretty, but you will have gnocchi and it will be good.  There is plenty of labor involved, though, and I’ll give you one piece of advice: if you have a good stand mixer, use it.  I think that’s where I got my misconceptions: last time I made these, I was in an industrial kitchen and had a mixer as big as me to do the hard work.  If you’re mixing by hand, be prepared to work it.  Or draft a “volunteer” to help you.

The process is straightforward, so simple that you barely need a recipe.  In fact, the recipe might be counterproductive, since the proportions are almost sure not to be what the recipe says.  Here’s what you do: first boil some potatoes – mashing potatoes like Russets are best, because once they’re cooked through, you’ll need to peel them and mash them.  Make sure they’re really, really smooth, then start to stir in flour.  And more flour.  And more flour.  But not too much!  You’re aiming for a dough that you can handle and shape nicely – but I never got mine beyond “tolerably sticky”.  The pretty, uniform gnocchi that you can find at nice Italian restaurants?  Mine looked nothing like that.  Mine looked more like globs, because I got tired of stirring in flour.  Once the dough is at whatever point it’s going to be at, form it into little balls and drop them, a few at a time, into simmering water.  In two or three minutes, they’ll start to float, and then you just fish them out and eat them.

The good news is that once they’re covered in sauce, no one cares in the slightest what they look like, and they will taste delicious even if your potato-to-flour ratio is slightly off.

One recipe I read suggested a pound of potatoes to a cup of flour – but it’ll undoubtedly vary with your potatoes and your flour.

That’s all there is to it.  You could probably add other things to them: a little salt and pepper, some finely grated parmesan (which I did), even some herbs.  But at the core, they’re just potato and flour.  But when you eat them, they’re so light and fluffy, you’d never know it.

If you think that’s fun, the next thing to try is cheese gnocchi – similar creatures, but perhaps even more delicious.  I made the cheese gnocchi recipe from Moosewood a couple years ago, and it was… well, come to think of it, maybe it’s about time to make those again…