The Omnivorous Fish

Photo by Shuna. Kitchen by Fish. Flour by King Arthur. Apron and Anvils by Acme.

It’s funny; looking back through this blog, you might think I had an incredibly rich, authentic Italian upbringing. This isn’t really the case, although it was for my parents. I had a fairly average- I think- Italian-American upbringing. Most of the people from “the other side” in my family had died or become frail by the time I was old enough to be really aware of what was cooking. There were stories of homemade ravioli and pasta drying on broom handles, and my early attempts were commented on by people who had plenty of experience, but I didn’t exactly grow up “shelling beans at my grandmother’s knee.” It might be more accurate to say I grew up opening bags of frozen peas at my grandmother’s waist.

A lot of what I know about Italian food- certainly Northern Italian food- I learned through study and working in restaurants. That’s not to say I didn’t learn anything; I did. In fact, it was the early lessons in the philosophy of eating that I value most. For example, I remember eating warm-from-the-sun figs from a tree literally growing out of a crack in the cement, or drinking wine with an obligatory hot lunch. These things I saw at my grandmother’s house- and great-grandmother’s house- were things I decidedly did not see in other households, my own included.

Pasta Machine

A lot of things I grew up eating, I recognize now as Italian-American. But how, you might ask. If your family has this direct connection to Italy, how did you come to eat these inauthentic foods? Well, there are a lot of reasons. For one thing, when my family came from Italy, they were dirt poor. The contadini didn’t sit around simmering partridge guazzetti all day long, making tajarin with a dozen egg yolks. Most of the meat they yielded went to the landowner, along with the highest grades of flour. A pound of pasta might be made with one egg, oil and water; half flour and half stalk meal, bran or sand; and served with boiled potatoes or escarole, often in soup. When they came here, there were cheap meat and tomatoes in cans- Madonna!, nelle latte!- so it comes as no surprise to me that the inherently American Sunday Gravy came into being. Likewise Italian-American lasagna, sausage and peppers, veal scallopini and fettucine alfredo: easier to make, more meat-laden cousins of their original counterparts on the other side.

And, there are things that I ended up just learning on my own. I took out a cookbook, made it and compared the results to other examples I’d seen. One of these things is gnocchi. They are, as I’m sure you’re aware, little dumplings, usually with an indentation on one side and ridges on the other. They are made all over Italy, sometimes with different ingredients, sometimes with different names, but a tiny dumpling with sauce-catching crevices can universally be called gnocchi. We’ll focus on the most common version right now, that is to say potato, but gnocchi can be made from cheese, semolina, chestnut meal and polenta, too.
Unsurprisingly, some of the greatest and most elaborate versions come from the North, near and around Italy’s own Little Germany, but arguably the most famous gnocchi come from Rome and are made from semolina: gnocchi alla romana.

I know, enough of all this. How do you make them?

Well, it’s easy, sort of. Start with 1-1/2 pounds of baking potatoes, like russet or Idaho (this is the same potato, but sometimes they’re labeled as “Idaho”), maybe 4 or 5. The success of your gnocchi is in the technique; the recipe is secondary, so listen up. Boil the potatoes gently until they are tender when pierced with a fork. This will vary greatly on the size and age of the potatoes. This time, it took about 25 minutes, but I could imagine it taking 40 minutes with fresher, larger potatoes. If the skins split, make mashed and start over. It is important that the potatoes be just tender and dry.

Drain the potatoes and lay them out on a towel. Peel and rice them as soon as you can stand it. The longer you wait the greater the risk of the gnocchi turning to glue. If you rice potatoes when they’re hot, they stay dry and fluffy. The longer you wait, the more the starch wants to adhere to itself. Like, Elmer’s.

Run them through a ricer or food mill with a medium blade as soon as you can. Spread the riced potatoes out on a board and sprinkle generously with salt. Allow them to cool, maybe 15 or 20 minutes.

Riced Potatoes

Measure out 1 cup (5 oz) of flour and beat one egg. Have plenty (at least 1 cup) of bench flour ready. Pour the egg over the potatoes and sprinkle over the 1 cup of flour. Working as quickly as possible, mix this into a dough, adding flour as needed. The longer you work the dough, the more flour you will need, the heavier the gnocchi, so make your movements count. When it’s a cohesive mass that’s mostly dry to the touch, continue to knead gently until it’s mostly smooth. You don’t need to stretch and push like pasta dough. If you cut the dough in half, it should still have tiny holes in it.

Cut unshaped gnocchi

Cut the dough into 5 or 6 pieces, sprinkle with flour and roll into ropes about ½” in diameter. Then cut into pieces about ½” long. When all the dough is cut, take a fork in your left hand (if you’re right handed) with the tines resting on the table. Put a piece of dough at the top of the tines (closest to your hand) and push toward the tines and down, so that you’re smushing the dough into the tines, but also down and therefore around the tip of your thumb, flouring the dough pieces and the fork as needed. This will leave ridges from the tines on one side, and a deep indentation from your thumb on the other. Alternatively, you could do this right against the board, so the ridges are less pronounced, or across a clean comb, if you like tighter ridges. I’ve seen people use ceramic ginger-graters, too. They make a small wooden gadget called an gnocchi comb for doing this, but I don’t know anyone who actually makes gnocchi that has one of these things. Get a life.

Transfer the gnocchi as you go (I do it every two handfuls) to a sheet pan lined with floured towels. Cook as soon as possible, or freeze solid, then transfer to plastic bags. They will keep for several weeks like this.

Whether fresh or frozen, drop a few at a time into boiling water, and cook until a moment or two after they float to the surface. They will cook- even frozen- in a fraction of the time of commercially produced gnocchi. They will plump and lighten in color. As always, let your taste be your guide.

Sauces for gnocchi run the gamut from simple tomato sauce to sage butter to cheese sauce to meat-laden affairs. Dessert versions are filled with or served with jam, sugar and breadcrumbs. The first of the two meals I made out of these was with a very basic tomato sauce, the next- which I’m about to make- will be a sauce of onions and fresh orange cherry tomatoes. And maybe sour cream. And maybe whatever else is about to go bad in the fridge.

These are really easy to make. Seriously, these can be a weeknight dinner. The first thing you should do? Put the water on to boil. Have kids? Perfect. Put them to work with a fork and a finger; anybody can do this. Don’t save these recipes for special occasions that never come. Tell them to put the god damn playstation controller down, and make them talk to you in your $10,000 remodel kitchen full of Viking appliances that haven’t been used except for the microwave. And most of all, enjoy.

Listening: “Naima” John Coltrane Giant Steps