We have moved and we have a new baby and now I can finally get back to the kitchen. My cooking at the moment is revolving around a big project on the weekend that I can then freeze to feed us all throughout the week. This last weekend I made several different types of gnocchi. This was my first attempt at this fabulous pasta dish and was very educational. I made a potato based gnocchi from this recipe and ricotta gnocchi from this one. Neither turned out quite as I had expected.
I had some very old potatos that I boiled and peeled. Since I don't have a food mill I mashed them up a bit and then threw in my my electric mixer's bowl and whipped them up real good, adding the egg. I then folded in the flour by hand so as not to overmix it. In cooking, the first batch of potato gnocchi I boiled pretty much dissolved in the pot. Undaunted I went ahead and added the next batch of 12 and they turned out great. I believe the starch content in the water helped keep the dumplings together. They turned out very light and fluffy, moreso than any I've ever gotten at a restaurant. The potato flavor really came through, it was like little dabs of mashed potato with tomato sauce. Nice, but both my wife and I prefered the ricotta.
These were very interesting. Rolling them in flour created something like a very delicate ricotta filled dumpling. I made mine too large so had some trouble getting them out of the pot intact. Noticing how the potato gnocchi formed a sort of dumpling shell I rolled the ricotta in flour a second time just before cooking to give it a strong enough shell to survive the boil. That worked quite well and didn't put too much dumpling around the cheese. I also tried adding a little flour to the ricotta so that would hold together better, but this neither helped in flavor or texture so should best be avoided.
