Gnocchi Goodness

Last December Jody wanted to get into (or perhaps wanted me to get into) making gnocchi. Never one to turn down an opportunity to make pasta, I ordered up some necessary tools from Amazon.com and away we went.  Now, I had never made gnocchi before so, I started with a recipe from the Food Network and Michael Chiarello.  I just used the recipe for the pasta.  The rest was improvised as always.  The result was a tasty, warm bowl, without being too heavy (as I fear most gnocchi dishes are). Potato Gnocchi, with white beans, spinach, mushrooms and pancetta.

I won’t repeat the recipe for the gnocchi, you can follow it above.  The basic steps were:

1. Cooking potatoes
2. Potato ricer pulverizing
3. dough making
4. dough rolling
5. dough cutting
6. dough mushing
7. pasta cooking

Whew!

The easy part was cooking potatoes and passing them through the ricer.  We ended up with a nice big bowl of potatoes.  The conversion to gnocchi dough was a bit of a messy process.  Working in the eggs and dry ingredients was a bit of a messy process.   I can suggest to add flour little by little till the dough is not too sticky.  The consistency is really important.  Otherwise it will be too sticky to roll out.

The rolling process was just taking a chunk of dough, and rolling it back and forth while pushing your hands to the sides slowly.  This stretched the dough out and created the long rolls of dough.

Next up, chopping the dough into about 1 inch chunks.  This was easy enough, the cutter worked well. It would have been good to have one of those pastry mats with a ruler on it though.  Having a cutter with a ruler pretty much did nothing…because you can’t measure and mark.

Once we had our army of gnocchi chunks we pushed them over the board.  I found it worked best and I got the best shape to push the cut end against the board and roll downward with my thumb.  The cut side would stick a little bit rather than the floured side.  I’d be interested to hear if this is actually the correct technique.

Now we heated up the water for the gnocchi, and also started some garlic, shallot and pancetta in a skillet. Once those were going, we added in some mushrooms and white beans and cooked them down.  Next into another skillet was some spinach.  Once the gnocchi were cooked we mixed all three into one bowl.  The result was a simple bowl of gnocchi, wilted spinach, mushrooms, and white beans.  I think the beans added a nice balance to the gnocchi, and with the mushrooms added an earthiness to the dish.

It is one we have made since…and will likely make again.