Bread is a classic example. It contains in its simplest form just flour, water, salt and yeast, but making a great loaf can take a person years to master. The tiniest variation in the temperature of the proofing environment, the hydration level of the dough or the intensity of your kneading can make or break the whole project. Gnocchi, a simple dumpling made from potatoes, flour and egg yolk, is no less of a challenge. Done right, though, gnocchi are pillowy and tender, and they practically melt in your mouth.
Like many of the best recipes for classic dishes, my gnocchi recipe came from an Italian nonna : The mother of Marco Canora, my original chef de cuisine at Craft, who grew up in the Tuscan town of Lucca. It can take them months or years of watching and helping before they get good enough to do it on their own.
First, a little history. Gnocchi, a. When the potato arrived on the scene in Europe in the 16th century, gnocchi quickly evolved into a primarily potato-based foodstuff. These days they are classified as a sort of pasta and typically served with a light sauce such as pesto, beurre fondue or a thin marinara to complement their delicate texture.
Now for the technique. Gnocchi dough is made by combining roasted potato, flour for absorbing moisture and providing gluten, and a little bit of egg yolk to add richness and help bind the dough together. The general principle is that you want to use as much potato and as little of everything else as possible to still end up with a cohesive dough.
Recipe Index. Lifestyle Cookbooks Shop Recipe Index. Published Apr 03, Last Updated Dec 22, When my parents picked me up from…. Pin Recipe Leave a Rating. A little slice in the top releases some of their steam so you can handle them. All of the potato gets scooped out and put through the ricer. The next step is kneading the potato and flour together. I go little by little until everything starts to come together.
A bit more kneading… And then the test! Then the rolling and cutting of the rest of the dough happens. Roll some more. And cut. No ratings yet. Author: Adrianna Adarme. Instructions Preheat the oven to degrees F. Place the potatoes on a baking sheet and bake until they're tender when poked with a fork. This should take about one hour.
When the potatoes are done, immediately slice them open to let the steam out. Bring a large pot of water to a boil; add a few pinches of salt. Scoop out the potato flesh and transfer it to a potato ricer or food mill. Push that thing down and repeat until you've passed all of the potato through the ricer. From there on the gnocchi were cooked for either 30, 60, 90, , or seconds.
Right after cooking they were placed in cool water to prevent further cooking on the countertop. The outside had become soft, but the inside was still hard and tough. All were soft and bouncy and would we have mixed them together, we would not have been able to tell a difference. Interestingly, starting at seconds, our gnocchi did start to become a little more sticky and crumbly.
However, differences were still minor. But, a floating gnocchi is not a requirement for being cooked! But we still want to know why they float and why that does seem to be some sort of assurance against undercooking them! Floating, or its reverse: sinking, is governed by density. If two components take up the same volume but have a different mass, their density is different. The component with the higher mass for the same volume has a higher density than the lighter product.
Feathers vs Lead: Keep in mind that you need to evaluate both the mass and volume to describe density. Of course, both are the same weight, however, those feathers would take up a lot more space than the lead.
The feathers have a considerably lower density. Roughly said, when the density of your food is heavier than that of water, it will sink as is the case for cocoa powder dispersed in milk. On the contrary, if the density is lower than that of water, it will float. It has become clear that for gnocchi to float during cooking, the density of the gnocchi has to go down.
But does that density go down permanently? Does a cooked gnocchi simply have a lower density than a raw gnocchi? When we moved our floating hot gnocchi from the boiling water into water at room temperature it would sink almost immediately. The density of water changes with temperature.
It is possible that our gnocchi did decrease in density enough to float in boiling water, but not enough to float in room temperature. Next up, we took some freshly cooked gnocchi that had had a chance to cool back down to room temperature approx. However, that was not the case.
Gnocchi cooked for 90 seconds or less took just as long to float back up again. Even more surprisingly, gnocchi that were cooked for seconds or more took a lot longer to re-float back to the surface! They took about 2 minutes, which is more than 30 seconds longer than the raw samples. We were surprised, to say the least! Also, remember our results from hypothesis 1. Even if we left the cooked gnocchi in boiling water, it would sink over time.
Instead, there seems to be a temporary change only! It led us to conclude that not necessarily the cooking process of the gnocchi determines whether the gnocchi floats. Get the print magazine, 25 years of back issues online, over 7, recipes, and more.
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