Recipe Rookie: Potato Gnocchi

After many attempts to make pasta from scratch without a pasta machine, I finally gave up. I could never get the dough thin enough, which resulted in bowls of thick, chewy noodles that didn’t catch sauce well. I will wait until better financial times to spring for a machine, but in the meantime, I decided to try a pasta that doesn’t require creating near-paper thin sheets of dough: gnocchi.

Gnocchi are small dumplings that are typically made from either potato or ricotta, along with egg and a bit of flour. Common gnocchi variations include sweet potato, pumpkin, and potato with spinach, but you can experiment with just about any starchy vegetable. They’re best when matched with a light marinara sauce or pesto, as they can be a heavy meal. Here’s a recap.

I found a potato gnocchi recipe at 101 Cookbooks and it looked simple enough. Four ingredients, a little bit of elbow grease, and some boiling water were all it required.

After boiling and skinning the potatoes, I followed Heidi’s instructions for using the tines of a fork to break the hot potatoes into small, fluffy pieces. I found using very light pressure worked best, as applying to much pressure led to larger chunks of potato breaking off. Most recipes call for using a potato ricer for this step, but really, what small apartment dweller has a potato ricer in their tool drawer?

After letting the potatoes cool, I added the egg, salt, and flour and got to kneading and rolling. Here are the newly cut gnocchi.

It took a bit of time to press each gnocchi against a fork to get its signature shape, but it definitely helped to hold a bit of sauce later.

They cooked very quickly, needing only about a minute and a half in boiling water before bobbing up to the surface.

The final product was an especially light gnocchi, considering the very heavy varieties I had at local Italian restaurants growing up in Binghamton. The whole process was surprisingly easy, just time consuming, so I recommend it for a Sunday evening meal.