Last week my good friend Giulia visited me from Italy. Among catching up on things, buying a car, and planning her trip to the coast of Oaxaca, an idea emerged regarding what to make for dinner. "How about making some gnocchi?" I was familiar with these small chunks of potato-pasta, which I actually think are quite tasty. But my immediate reaction was to oppose the idea. It's just way too complicated...
In the end, however, it didn't take her a lot to convince me. After all, I had an enthusiastic Italian right there, who was also quite experienced at making this dish. So why not? We didn't even have to buy any ingredients, as we happened to have everything at home: a few potatoes, an egg, some flour, tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese for the sauce, a bit of herbs and spices, that's it.
Getting the Hands in the Dough
At first we cooked the potatoes, and mashed them up well. Well means really well... Typical mashed potatoes wouldn't cut it, as we needed a very fine puree, which includes mashing the tiny chunks too. Then we had to combine the potatoes with the flour. Should I have used the blender for that? "No way!" said Giulia dismissively, and thus saving not only the potatoes but probably the blender as well.
Next came the egg. One raw egg, beaten, and added to the masked potatoes. This would make it stick together. But for that we had to mix it in really well... Which is where our hands came in, or to be more exact, my hands. There was only so much space in the bowl. Once I accepted the dough sticking to my hands, I was okay with kneading it. And I kept finding more small chunks of potatoes which I had to keep mashing up.
Rolling out the Snake
Once the dough had become a pretty homogeneous mix, we spread some flour out on the table where we rolled out a piece of the dough into a long snake form, of about a finger's thickness. Then we cut them into thick pieces, kinda the size and shape we know gnocchi to be. With a fork we pressed the iconic stripes into it. Now they were ready to be cooked.
Throwing them into boiling water, they will immediately sink to the bottom. I gave them a good stir, as I usually do with pasta, to make sure they don't stick to the bottom. Now I only have to wait for them to come up to the surface when they are ready so I can skim them off with a strainer.
Into the Sauce
The rest is pretty straight forward. Dump the pasta (or in this case the potato pasta) into the prepared sauce. I simply fried up some onions and mixed them with tomato sauce, added salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Once I had rolled the gnocchi around in it, it was ready to serve. I added grated Parmesan on top.