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I have at least four recipes for basic gnocchi: Viana La Place’s in Pasta Fresca, which was my first cookbook and is still dear to my heart; the one in Italian, which was the second cookbook I ever had; Jamie Oliver’s in Cook With Jamie, which has grown on me; and Keller’s in The French Laundry Cookbook, which is a cookbook that originally disappointed me but that I’ve since come to love. Make that five, since there must be a recipe in Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, although I haven’t finished reading it yet. Possibly six, since The Art of Simple Food might have one, as well.

Anyway, ever since I first encountered gnocchi, I’d heard that they were difficult to make from scratch, too labor-intensive and hard to get right. I hadn’t really thought about that, just taken it for granted, but then I started cooking out of TFLC and fell in love with the challenges. The things in TFLC aren’t hard, per se, but they’re more complicated from a technical and logistical perspective than my usual cooking.

Technical: you want me to mince vegetables into 1/16″ cubes? Turn vegetables? Make an oblique cut? What is an oblique cut, these directions make no sense!

Logistical: So, the sage has to be blanched in Big Pot #1, in which the agnolotti will also cook later on, and the creme fraiche sauce has to heat in Small Pot #1, while the garnish is fried in Small Pot #2, and the sauce is strained through Chinois #1 into Small Skillet to keep warm while the garnish is drained and the agnolotti are boiled and drained in Chinois #2, and then the butter is browned in Non-stick Skillet? Got it? Good.

I like cooking from TFLC because it pushes my technical and planning skills, introduces me to new ingredients and foods (parsnips! Bordelaise sauce!), and the flavor combinations end up being mind-blowingly nuanced and delicious. There’s also the sheer challenge of it: this book is supposed to be hard? Well, bring it on! I will spend two days making veal stock, I will cave in and replace the blade on my food processor so I can make chive oil, I will painstakingly slice potatoes into 1/16″ slices and layer them for potatoes mille feuille! I will make meals that cause me to have these thoughts:

19th&F: It’s 10 P.M. on a Friday night and the symphony just finished. I’d really like to go for a drink at Absinthe, I bet Therese would be up for it.
19th&F: Wait a minute, I have to get home and prep the bone marrow and marinate the ribs for pot-au-feu tomorrow! -goes home-

and

19th&F: -sits bolt upright in bed at 6:45 A.M. on Saturday- I NEED TO CHANGE THE SOAKING WATER FOR THE BONE MARROW!

And I will enjoy it all! Ha! Ha!

Right. When I made the pot-au-feu, I needed a vegetarian course that Chris could also eat (he ended up bedridden with my flu and missed dinner, unfortunately), so I pulled the gnocchi recipe from TFLC and made a cream and dolcelatte gorgonzola sauce to go with it. The gnocchi were time-consuming but a lot easier than I’d expected them to be.

First, bake potatoes for an hour. Open the oven, realize that I haven’t baked whole potatoes in a really long time, and so I forgot to prick holes in them with a fork and so they’re not quite done. Oops. Prick holes, stick back in oven until they’re done.

Pass through a food mill, because I already have a food mill and buying a potato ricer just for making gnocchi would not be worth the space it’d take up.

A bowl of potatoes passed through a food mill, with flour and eggs.

Think about how cool the milled potatoes look, like little waving worms! Alien worms! Make a well in the center of the potatoes and put in some flour and eggs. TFLC says to use a pastry scraper to chop the whole shebang into dough very quickly, or else the dough will toughen up. I don’t have a pastry scraper, but I figured a pastry cutter would work just as well. Find out that the pastry scraper is missing, toss the whole kitchen and my room, end up using a rice paddle to quickly shape the alien worms into a slightly shaggy mess of potato dough. I don’t have many pictures of most of this process because my hands were covered with potato dough and flour.

Take a moment to pause and think about the potato dough. I bake occasionally and have worked with different kinds of dough, but I’ve never worked with potato dough before. How cool is it to go from a solid, raw potato to a ball of dough? It’s way cool that it can transform into something so unlike what it started off as!

Flour the counter, break off balls of potato dough, roll them into snakes, and cut them into 1″ lengths. I don’t have a gnocchi ridger but I’m seriously contemplating getting one, dislike of unitaskers be damned, because the alternative is rolling gnocchi over the back of a fork, and I can now testify that that is nowhere near as easy or neat as cookbooks make it sound. “Roll over the back of a fork” – ha! What they don’t tell you is that it won’t give you neat, even ridges, that you’ll have a hell of a time rolling it on the fork without smushing it (and overworking the dough and toughening it) and that the ridges will hardly show, anyway.

Meanwhile, I put a large pot of salted water on to boil, set up an ice bath, cleared a shelf in the freezer, lined one baking sheet with a clean dish towel, and lined another baking sheet with parchment paper. The rolled and ridged gnocchi went into the pot until they floated to the top:

Cooked gnocchi floating to the top of the pot.

at which point they were removed from the pot with a skimmer and dumped in an ice bath:

Gnocchi in the ice bath.

There was more ice in the bath originally, but it melted. After being shocked, the gnocchi went onto a towel-lined baking sheet to drain (I don’t use paper towels, I think they’re wasteful) and then onto a parchment paper-lined baking sheet to go into the freezer:

Gnocchi draining on a tray covered with a dish towel and waiting to go into the freezer.

Making gnocchi was fun, although labor- and time- intensive. The recipe in TFLC makes “20 dozen,” or 240 gnocchi. O_O It’s not a job you can multi-task, either, since it requires using your hands and they’re frequently covered with potatoes and flour. I ended up putting House on to help the time pass. It’s nice and convenient to have many, many bags of gnocchi in the freezer and I will make them again when this batch is used up. Next time, I want to see if I can make them come out more tender–these were fine but were ever so slightly tough, since I ended up working the dough more than was ideal. I’d also like to get them all coming out the same size and shape, which did not happen this time:

Thin gnocchi, thick gnocchi, gnocchi with rounded ends, gnocchi with squared-off ends, blobby gnocchi.

Sincerely Yours,
19th&F

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