Keep On Gnocchi But You Can’t Come In!

Every time I mention to someone that cooking is a hobby of mine, I’m immediately asked what my ‘best’ recipe is. Most what I do involves just randomly grabbing recipes from the internet and trying them out; I don’t have many staples, and I have even less I’d say that I can really show off. There was the occasional dish I thought I could do really well. I think I know how to PROPERLY barbecue an excellent steak, my penne with veggies dish is a long term favorite of Tracy, and some trickier common recipes like lasagna go over well.

But since I started cooking, I’ve had an obsession with making a good ragu bolognese. Normally served over spaghetti (traditionally tagliatelle) it’s the Italian sauce that everybody knows and loves. I’ve never made pasta from scratch, though I intend to learn, but I have learned how to make the next best thing.

Gnocchi.

Gnocchi (pronounced nyo-kee, I got this wrong for years) are wonderful little potato dumplings which are as versatile as pasta, much easier to make, and something which most cooks don’t really bother with. I’ve made them several times now, and have generally been quite satisfied with the results. This, with the ragu, are two things I know I can make well, and know I can impress people with.

So today I present the dish which I feel is the signature Dave dish – Gnocchi Di Patate Con Ragu Di Agnello. Or boiled potatoes dumplings in a lamb meat sauce. It should be noted that I usually make my ragus with ground pork, but thought I’d give lamb a whirl.

Ragu With Lamb:

1 pound ground lamb
1/3 cup of diced red wine salami (this can be substituted with proscuitto, parma ham, pancetta, good bacon, etc…)
2 small onions
2 stalks of celery
2 medium sized carrots
Good extra virgin olive oil
1 tin of tomato paste
1/2 cup of whole milk
1/2 cup of chicken broth (you should really use white wine for this, which I didn’t have at the time of writing)
A good handful of fresh basil or oreagno. Rosemary also might work since we’ve got lamb here.

Most of what I’ve learned here comes from reading the fantastic website http://fxcuisine.com, a food blog by a French speaking Swiss home cook who has done several ragu recipes, as well as variety of different research from cookbooks and other web sites. This is a blend of various recipes and techniques I’ve read, and certainly not that traditional. Oh well!

As I was quite intent on making this properly, I started with meticulously dicing my vegetables. Small tiny cubes, all the same size… which I fail at achieving, but this is about as close as I can hope to without serious, regular practice.

After that I put my mitts on this beautiful salami we picked up from the Mediterranean market in town, and diced a good chunk of it up. A little easier to work with than the vegetables since it’s one consistent shape.

Meanwhile I had thrown a big pot on the stove with several turns of olive oil in the bottom to heat up at medium-low heat. Once ready, all those little veggies cubes go in to build a soffrito; the base for the sauce. After I’ve given the onions plenty to sweat about, the salami goes in as well to add its fatty goodness. This all merrily sizzled away for a while until it was time for the second phase of my insane plan.

Now came  a trick. I grabbed my ground lamb, and switch burners on the stove – moving my large pot to a small burner. Shoving all the vegetables to one side, I turned the burner to medium high, and on the empty pot, slowly added the lamb, which I roughed up with a metal flipper as it browned. As each batch got browned, that got stirred in with veggies and shoved to the side.

Describing this as tedious doesn’t do it justice – the lamb seemed much harder to break up than other ground meats, and I ended up with a few meatballs in the pot. They broken down during the cooking process, so no harm done! Step two was sauce reduction! This obviously required a higher heat, so back on the main burner, it got cranked up to medium high, and I quickly added my chicken broth. This reduced in no time to a very thick consistency. After that, the milk.

Since whole milk is best for this, I tossed in a bit of cream as well. This all merrily reduced down around everything. Without the tomato, this would still be just delicious. But we’re adding tomato anyways. Now I’m always faced of the choice between canned whole plum tomatoes or tomato paste. Whole plum tomatoes give a consistency of millions of vegetables chunks in an extremely thin sauce. Tomato paste makes everything extremely thick and has a wonderful, velvety texture. Going with paste for the gnocchi.

Now, for the more patient, you can repeat the same step I did with browning the meat – scraping away a spot on high heat for you to caramelize the tomato paste in small batches. I didn’t do that this time, and just stirred the can in willy nilly, but it’s definitely worth the time.

Now everything looks a good deal like a proper ragu, and it’s time to let the flavours marry. This got thrown down to a low heat, lidded, with a pitcher of filtered water nearby in case it gets dry. I’d recommend letting a sauce like this cook for at least two hours, but I went hardcore and it cooked for at least four by the end of it. We tried a few pictures here, but there was too much steam to really get a good shot, so you can imagine the previous photos but uh, red.

Either way, this gave me time to play some Civilization and destroy the Carthaginians!

Gnocchi:

Four medium sized potatoes
At least a cup and a half of flour
One egg
Salt and pepper
Lots and lots of boiling waterfall
Couple tablespoons of butterfly
A generous helping of high quality parmesan (I used grana padano, but parmiagno reggiano is what you want)
A potato ricer or mill

Whereas the ragu really just involves chopping things up, fiddling with meat in a pan, and waiting for half a day, the gnocchi is a little easier to get wrong. The idea is to make a dough with mashed potatoes, roll it out, chop it into little dumplings, shape the dumplings, and boil them for a few minutes. I added the extra step of briefly frying them in butter, because I’m not going to pretend this is health food and butter is delicious.

Water is an absolute no-no in gnocchi dough, and so skinning and chopping up the potatoes to boil them conventionally isn’t an option. Usually, I bake them, but I don’t want to wait an hour – and so they just went into the water with skins on! Much more wholesome than having the little layabouts go skinny dipping.

Forty-five minutes in, the potatoes were done – during this time I also diced up some basil and oregano and threw it in the ragu. Reason I waited is that after a certain point I find fresh herbs go bitter. At this time, I had to fish out the spuds and peel the bastards.

This little step was about as much fun as getting locked in a closet with fourteen rabid cats and Hitler  – simply because the potatoes were REALLY hot. I couldn’t really wait though – if the potatoes cool, it screws up the texture of the gnocchi as they get all starchy. So I mangle a couple with a spoon before I give up and burn my fingers removing the skins. Now, it’s time to mash.

A potato masher, in this case, will not do. Gnocchi can’t have ANY lumps, and you want an airy texture. An invention my mother got me hooked on, the potato ricer, is perfect. If you like mashed potatoes – buy a potato ricer. Nothing gives them a nicer texture. Here’s a shot of the potato ricer in action.

Oh yeah.

Now it’s the fun part! The riced potato got ten minutes to cool down as forming dough whilst screaming in agony isn’t really worth it. The technique here is (I think) the same one used to make paste dough. Form a little well in your potatoes, and then drop in an egg.

Once that’s done, I beat the egg within the potatoes, seasoned with some salt and pepper, and started caving in the sides of the well.

As I did this, flour got liberally sprinkled over everything. This continued until the well had completely caved in, and enough flour was added to lose the stickiness. At this point, it got treated like a normal dough and was quickly kneaded into a ball. Gnocchi dough should be airy – a minimum of work to make it just right. Also, for any of you who bake, nothing quite feels as nice as potato dough. So smooth and silky. Almost… sensual.

*cough*

Now comes the tedious part. Ripping off a handful of dough from the dough ball, I quickly rolled it out into a long dowel-shaped… stick a little wider than my thumb.

Using a fork, I chopped off 1/2 inch bits, and dusted those with flour. Now, these can be boiled like gnocchi and will be fine. But they’re not fun to look at, and won’t hold sauce. Time for shaping!

This was the hardest thing for me to learn, and frankly, I think this recipe is the first time I got most of them just right. The trick is to take a fork, hold it at a 45 degree angle, press down the dumpling, and roll it off. The undersides will curl up, and the top will be creased. Like so:

I vainly tried to get Tracy to help/join in the fun, but she knew tedious work when she saw it, and was also battling Gandhi for control of the known world. C’est la vie. It should also be noted that consistency when doing this is EXTREMELY hard. To get every gnocchi to be of a perfect size and shape take either hours of work or years of practice. I don’t have either to spare. Still, they turned out alright.

So now it’s setup time. While forming the gnocchi I’d tossed out the potato skin water (ewww) and set on a fresh pot with plenty of salt. A plate was set up for the gnocchi, and finally a pan with some butter in it to quickly sauté the little buggers.

Cooking them, luckily, is the easiest part. Going with around nine at a time (I had a big pot) I tossed the gnocchi in, and simply waited for them to float. Once they floated, they were done – into the pan and another batch into the water. I used a small sieve to lift them out of the water. They can’t be poured out or they’ll break up and all the hard work will have been for naught.

Either way, once they were out of the pan and hit the plate – they were done! Onto the gnocchi went a hearty ladle of ragu, and finally a generous helping of grana padano!

The Verdict:

Well thank GOD these turned out. If this was going to be my “I’ll try to cook something I know I’m good at” blog post I’d look a right ass if they didn’t. Either way, the gnocchi were light and delicious, and words cannot describe how good the ragu was. Lamb was a great choice for the ragu and added an incredible depth of flavour to the rich, velvety sauce. Perfection is a poor word, so I’ll say that everything here was as good as I could have ever hoped and may be one of my best meals ever. Yay me!