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Gnocchi

This recipe is for basic gnocchi, which can then be frozen and used as needed, e.g., in Pan-seared Gnocchi. It’s from Amber’s blog. Amber has also dug up a Sweet Potato Gnocchi recipe which comes highly recommended.

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. Bake the potatoes until a skewer goes all the way through (about 1h at 350, or 50m at 400). Check this – undercooked potato doesn’t rice well.
  2. Peel the potatoes before they cool
  3. Rice the potatoes
  4. Allow to cool completely (do not refrigerate)
  5. Hand-mix in flour until a rope holds together while rolling
  6. Form. Most guides I can find say to use the tines of a fork, rolling little 3/4” balls of dough against the tines with your thumb to create an indentation (thumb) and ridges (tines). I once saw an Iron Chef contestant do this with a spoon, at the rate of about 20 gnocchi/second, but I’m not even an aluminum chef yet, so I guess that will have to wait.
  7. Boil (just until they rise to the surface) or freeze immediately. Note to self: you can’t freeze ‘em after you boil ‘em.

Notes

I cheated on this recipe a little bit, and it came out fine. When you’re mixing the flour and potato, you basically have to have the ratio right before you start mixing. Then, as you start to apply pressure, the liquid from the potato starts to make the flour into real dough. Trouble is, if you’re way off on the ratio, it’s hard to get it consistent with hand mixing. So my “cheat” was that I dumped a whole bunch of “failed” rolls (too much flour or too much potato) into the bowl of my Kitchenaid and fired it up. Sure enough, it did its thing and mixed the dough to a beautiful, slightly tacky consistency.

This suggests that one of my primary failings was simply not mixing the dough well enough before rolling. It’s quite possible I’ve had the ratio right, or close, many times, but that I’ve started rolling it prematurely, allowing the roll to break along potato-heavy fracture lines.