I think a lot of us have discovered how easy it is to make home-made pasta. In fact, I’ve got a nice pasta machine that rolls out thin layers of pasta, with the option of cutting it into fettucine or spaghetti. But as Chef Jerry Pellegrino points out, there’s one very good pasta shape that doesn’t involve machinery, but it does involve a hands-on approach and that would be gnocchi.
We suppose someone’s got a machine to make gnocchi, but it’s so easy to do it by hand. And there’s one unique thing about gnocchi, and that’s the dough. Unlike standard pasta with flour and eggs, gnocchi dough incorporates potatoes. In fact, I actually think gnocchi are more like a dumpling than a pasta.
The ideal gnocchi should be light and fluffy. The potato helps to prevent gluten development which would toughen up the dough. And avoiding gluten build up is the entire goal in making gnocchi.
And what is gnocchi? Well, they are little pillows, about ¾” long, and ideally with little grooves and a dimple pressed into them to help carry the sauce.
The dough is unique. We’ll start with the potatoes, and good old russets work just fine. You’re going to bake them for an hour, cool them down, and then cut them length-wise. Let the steam get out, because this gets rid of additional moisture, which can promote gluten development. Scoop out the potato flesh into a bowl. If you have a potato ricer, use it to squeeze though all of the potatoes. If you don’t, you can use an old-fashioned potato masher or one of those semi-circular pastry cutters… just be sure to get rid of as many lumps as possible.
When it comes to working the flour and eggs into the dough, there’s a good ratio you can use: for every pound of cooked, riced potato, use three and ¾ ounces of all-purpose flour and one egg. This is when that kitchen scale comes in handy. So let’s say we end up with two pounds of riced potatoes; that would be 7 and ½ ounces of flour and two eggs.
In making pasta, this is when we make the traditional well in the middle of the flour. But we don’t do that with the potatoes. We’re going to spread out the potatoes flat on our work surface. Season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Take the flour and using a sifter, dust the potatoes until they are thoroughly covered. Then take your eggs, which are room-temp and whisked, and drizzle them over the pile of floured potatoes. Now comes the sort of indispensable tool for making gnocchi: the pastry scraper. Use it to scrape the ingredients together, working it lightly. Just keep scraping until everything is evenly incorporated. Then using your hands, work the dough into a loaf shape and knead it ever so slightly to get it smooth and pliable.
And now the fun part which sort of takes us back to kindergarten! We’ll use the pastry scraper to slice off chunks of dough, and then we will roll those out to make what we used to call a rope (or a snake). It’ll be about a foot long and less than an inch thick. Now it’s just a matter of cutting ¾” pieces of the rope until you’ve finished.
And what about the grooves? This is when you need a nice Italian grandma. Simply take a fork and lay it face side down on the bench. Take a little gnocchi and press it gently into the tines of the fork and roll it down. Bingo, you’ve got your grooves which look very professional. Now, this may not be absolutely necessary, but those grooves do hold a lot of sauce. And then we cook the gnocchi in simmering water and fish them out when they rise to the top. And then it’s on to serving them with a sauce, and there’s about a million and a half sauce recipes on the internet. And of course, if you’ve avoided any gluten formation, you’ll have perfect fluffy pillows, dripping with sauce.
