Gnocchi!

For a few months now, I've wanted to try my hand at making gnocchi after enjoying a particularly spectacular gnocchi dish from Maggiano's in Durham. I brought down my Italian Vegetarian cookbook and found a simple potato gnocchi recipe. The main reason I didn't try to make this dish earlier is because I did not own a potato ricer -- one of the most important devices for making gnocchi [apparently]! That is, until I broke down and bought one off of Amazon.com because I simply had to make these.

The recipe I used was pretty basic, a couple pounds of baked, riced potatoes with enough flour to make the dough not sticky plus a teaspoon of salt. I took a shortcut and baked the potatoes in the microwave, which seemed to work fine. After they were baked, I peeled them [with oven mits, those things were hot] and riced them into a bowl. In the first picture, you can see the potato ricer and the carnage of potato peelings left in my sink.

Once in the bowl, I let them cool and then added the flour and salt. Following the recipe, I mixed it all together by hand until it was incorporated but not overworked. Working with this dough was interesting because the dough has a unique texture: soft and silky but almost stiff as well.

Next the fun part! Rolled out the dough into long "ropes" on the counter and then cut them into 3/4" pieces. One of the most unique things about gnocchi in my opinion is the shape of the pieces. Ridges on one side, but a smooth indent on the other. The Italian Vegetarian cookbook (which is an amazing cookbook, by the way) told me to use a fork and use my index finger to put the indent into the back. So what I ended up doing was to use the back of the fork and place each piece, one by one, onto the fork and press their backs -- pushing them into the fork, to give the ridges, and leaving the indent from my finger. I guess that was the point!

Next step was to plop them into boiling water and wait until they started floating. I had to try one at this point, even sans-sauce, and it was the kind of melt-in-your mouth texture that I was hoping for! I used a slotted spoon to fish them out of the water and mixed them with some pre-made pesto sauce. Unfortunately I didn't have any fresh pesto -- but I'm working on it! More on that some other time.

Served them with some peas, and they were delicious. My roommates (and I of course) loved it!

An experiment well done, with delicious, tasty results.