Gastronomy612′s Weblog

For the last four weeks, I have been a housewife.  My current unemployment affords me the ability to spend a lot of time in the kitchen (in slippers and unpregnant mind you), cooking, baking and I am constantly menu planning whether seriously or merely gathering ideas from various sources.  I attempted to make gnocchi several weeks ago.  It was an utter failure and I threw it away before anyone else laid eyes on it…then I asked if we could get a burger.  This time, understanding my failure and with knowledge of how to fix it, I followed the recipe from the October issue of (the now defunct) Gourmet Magazine and  made some killer sweet potato gnocchi.

After baking, cooling and peeling the potatoes, I cubed them up and threw them in our food processor.  I do not own a food mill, nor a potato ricer – though I have considered purchasing them both, only to conclude that it is another kitchen gadget I don’t really need.  Nevertheless, I processed them until I had a very smooth result (absolutely no chunks of any kind).

Because creating gnocchi is no different from creating any other kind of dough, I decided to throw the smoothed potatoes with the eggs, spices, cheese and flour into my mixer and mix until just combined rather than knead by hand.  Because you are dealing with a flour product, you never want to over-beat it in fear of a tough product – it is usually best to mix until just combined, unless you are instructed otherwise (like for bread).  I added more flour and cheese than what the recipe called for, but I understood that the desired product was a dough based one so the texture needed to reflect that.

When I attained the right texture, I roped these guys up!  Try as I might, I just could not form the gnocchi into the attractive cylinder with tine markings as are common in gnocchi.  Instead, I made a pillow shape.  With the handle of my fork, I created a small well in the center to hold the sauce, which is really the only reason to struggle and make tine markings, aside from tradition I suppose.

While I waited to get a large pot of water to come to a rolling boil, David came home with the sage and fried it up. Because I could not find chestnuts at the store, I opted to use the pecans we have in the pantry to give the dish the crunchy texture that I assumed the recipe was trying to achieve.  We used the same pan and oil from the sage and gently roasted the pecans while boiling the gnocchi until it floated to the top.  After removing the pecans from the oil, David added the butter to the pan to create a very simple sauce (anything heavier would have overshadowed the various flavored of this dish), and we lightly pan-fried the gnocchi in the sauce for a few seconds before it was plated.

From bottom to top, it went like this:  sauce covered gnocchi, parmesan cheese, pecans, and fried sage leaves on top.  Though the flavors were simple in themselves, the combination was complex and hearty – perfect for autumn.