Gnocchi!

Gnocchi!  We love it and after we watched another episode of "Ciao Chow! ", we decided to make it.  We got baking potatoes, roasted them the day before, and put in the fridge to cool over night.  One of the many keys to gnocchi is that the potato has to be cold.  

After an over night in the fridge, I scooped out the inside of the baked potato.   In a  standing mixer, I had  three pounds (almost) of potato, 2 cups of flour, and one cup of shredded parmesan cheese (you are really supposed to use grated, but I picked up the wrong kind at the store). 

 

I put in the cheese, flour, and a bit of nutmeg into the standing mixer first and gave them a swirl.  I added salt and pepper, and then, all at once, I added the potato.  As Fabio says, you will think that the ingredients are going to combine and you might be tempted to add some water or other form of moisture.



Don't.



It will take a few minutes, and I thought that my standing mixer might throw in the towel-- it is harder to mix together than my great grandmother Mammy's pound cake.  Eventually, the ingredients do combine and make a lovely dough.

I cut off small hunks of the dough, after I slapped and kneaded it around a bit to get any air bubbles out.  Once I had my hunk, I rolled it out like a long cigar.   When the roll was about a thumb thick, I then sliced it into nuggets.  My sou-chefes (Will and Kelly), having already prepared the cooking pots: one for boiling the gnocchi and the other to crisp it up a bit with some olive oil, garlic, more salt and pepper, and crush red pepper flakes.

 

Once the gnocchi were in the boiling water and started to rise, we pulled them out.  They cook really fast and when I make this again, I will only use 2 potatoes instead of 4 and freeze any extra dough after I had cut plenty of pieces.  

After the boil, we started to brown the gnocchi in the sauté pan.  Since my three pounds of potatoes had made so many nuggets, we were doing this for a while--and I might have used too much red pepper flakes when putting a 2nd or 3rd batch of gnocchi into the pan. Ahem.  

We browned the gnocchi and then plated with freshly grated parmesan cheese.  Served with a salad, and some nice read wine, we had ourselves a lovely, albeit spicy, plate of homemade gnocchi. Delicious!