The Omnivorous Fish

Photo By Shuna. Dough and Hands by Fish. Scraper by Dexter

A brazen hussy asked the following questions of my recent treatise on gnocchi making. They are all good questions, therefore they get a post of their own.

How come you can let the potatoes cool after you rice them and not before?

The temperature of the potato flesh affects how it adheres to itself. A cold cooked potato is much sticker than a hot one. In something that obliterates the structure of the potato (like a potato crepe), this doesn’t really matter, but the structure of the potato in this case is the gnocchi.

When you rice a hot potato, it essentially explodes, coming apart into little autonomous shreds and flakes. When you rice a cool one, it comes out… well, how it sounds: like a cold potato.

When you knead the potatoes/flour/egg, are you kneading with your hands like bread or biscuits?

When kneading the dough, it’s more like biscuits than bread in the sense that it’s more about smushing and less about stretching. You are not trying to activate the gluten in the flour, you’re merely trying to mix the dough. It really should have tiny pinholes left in it, in a perfect world.

If you need to potatoes to be dry, shouldn’t they be baked instead of boiled?

You boil the potatoes because of the same reason you do everything in Italian cooking: my grandmother boiled them and her grandmother boiled them, etc. Although this is true, in reality the nature of a boiled potato is different than that of a baked potato. I find that baking compresses them and causes them to become more floury (therefore starchy, therefore gluey), which will cause them to rice differently. Since I see several batches in the near future, I will rice some of each and do a little analysis.

Do your gnocchi taste mostly of flour or potato?

If you’re making your gnocchi with white flour, they should not taste of it. This means either your gnocchi are not sufficiently cooked, or there is too much flour in the dough (most likely the latter). They taste subtly of potato, but are more- to me- an excercise in texture than anything else. They taste “rich.”

Other gnocchi that feature a special kind of flour obviously will taste of it and potato.

If you were to use a flour with no gluten in it are there any adjustments you’d need to make for lack of structure/protein?

I can speak with some experience here and say it’s very safe to experiment. I mean, it’s a dumpling.

I recently read something about not putting salt into gnocchi because of the hygroscopic nature of the dough salt produces. It’s true that many gnocchi recipes do not include salt, and my gnocchi are particularly fragile compared to the commercial animal, so I feel experimentation in my future. That said, I might leave the salt out completely in gluten free versions, but I can tell you that successful gnocchi have been made for a long time out of chestnuts, cornmeal and buck[not really a]wheat.

Some things crave experimentation, and the results often hide well in casseroles, although if you’re allergic to gluten and cheese, I can’t help you with the recycling. I have had a lot of these kinds of alternate recipes on my mind lately, especially chestnuts. I have been craving trentinese (from Trentino, not Trenton) troffie, “pigs’ tails,” made of chestnut flour and sauced with pesto, potatoes and green beans. Whole wheat pasta with nettles and speck springs to mind, too. You know how these dishes were discovered? People experimented. You should, too.