We had lots of tomatoes and lots of potatoes accumulating from our Farmer's Box, and we needed something to do with them. The tomatoes were of the plum variety, which are pretty much good for tomato sauce and not much else. We also had two egg yolks, and a quick google search indicated that you could add egg yolks to gnocchi. So I thought it would be fun to make our own gnocchi with the potatoes and make Marcella Hazan's classic sauce. The gnocchi is also adapted from Marcella Hazan, and I'll mention how we differed as I go through. Both recipes can be found in
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, by Marcella Hazan. This book has quite a bit of information on cooking.
First, start your sauce. That takes a while to cook. We made the Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter, which according to Marcella, is "the simplest of all sauces to make, and none has a purer, more irresistibly sweet tomato taste." It's the recommended sauce for the gnocchi, but more on that at the end. Marcella says to use fresh, naturally and fully ripened, plum tomatoes when available. You can also use canned. If using fresh, start with 2 pounds, and if using canned use 2 cups cut up, with their juice. When using fresh tomatoes, you need to peel them. Bring a pot of water to boil. Then, cut a cross over the stem of your tomato, like so:
Once the water is boiling, plunge your tomato into the boiling water using a slotted spoon or ladle, hold it there for about a minute, then pull it out. When it's cooled enough that you can stand to touch the tomato, peel off the skin. It should come off pretty easily, but if not you have the cuts in the cross where you can start peeling. Quarter the tomatoes and put them in the saucepan, or dump the canned tomatoes right in. Add five tablespoons butter, one medium onion, cut in half, and salt to taste. Marcella says if it's not salty enough on it's own, it's not salty enough to go with pasta. Cook, uncovered, for at least 45 minutes. Marcella says never to cook sauce in a covered pot because it won't be flavorful. Sauce cooks by evaporation. Stir from time to time, mashing any tomato chunks with a spoon. Once it was done, we ran the immersion blender through it, because I love my immersion blender. Here is the final product:
While the sauce is simmering (we simmered for an hour and a half), make the gnocchi. If you're concerned about timing, wait until the sauce is done. It's better to have sauce waiting for gnocchi than gnocchi waiting for sauce. To make the gnocchi, first peel 1.5 pounds of potatoes. According to Marcella, the choice of potato is "critical." You can't use a baking potato or a new potato. Quoth Marcella: "The only reliable potato for gnocchi is the more or less round, common kind known as a 'boiling' potato." Marcella says to boil the potatoes in their skins, but we peeled ours first. Cook until tender, but don't prick them too much or they will get waterlogged. You really do want them tender; ours were a bit underdone and we had some large potato chunks in a few of our gnocchi. Marcella says to puree through a food mill, but we don't have one of those, so I mashed them roughly with a potato masher and then used the immersion blender. You want it very smooth.
Once the potatoes are mashed, turn them out onto a work surface dusted with flour. Ideally, you have a beautiful granite countertop for this. We don't, so we used our hard-to-clean countertop before realizing that a wooden cutting board was the better choice. Add about a cup of flour to the mixture. It will be done with the flour/potato mixture is soft and smooth but still slightly sticky. At this point, we added two egg yolks and a tablespoon of ricotta. Here is what Marcella says about adding an egg: "Some people do use eggs because the dough becomes easier to handle, but that method, which is called
alla parigina, 'Paris style,' results in a tougher, more rubbery product." I thought ours were fine. Since we used egg yolks and ricotta, we needed another half-cup of flour.
When the dough is the right consistency, add more flour to your work surface, split the dough up into 2-4 parts, and roll each part into a snake-like roll about an inch in diameter. Slice the roll into pieces about 3/4"-1" long. Once it's cut into pieces, you have to shape the gnocchi. Well, you don't actually have to, but you should, since "they will cook more evenly and hold sauce more successfully." To shape it, take a fork and hold it so the fork is at about a 45 degree angle with the counter. Roll your little slices along the concave side with your index finger. This was a little tricky, but this is how the gnocchi looked before and after cooking:
After it's shaped, it's ready for cooking. Bring a pot of water to a boil, add salt. Before you cook all the gnocchi, test it out with 2-3. Ten seconds after they have floated to the surface, take them out and taste them. If it tastes like raw flour, add a few seconds to the cooking time, if they are nearly dissolved, subtract a few seconds. We added a few seconds. Drop in about two dozen, and when they float to the surface, remember what you decided to do after the test batch. When they are done, scoop them out and add the next batch. Now they are ready to be sauced and eaten! Of course, you will want to add Parmesan cheese.
A note about sauce: my preferred sauce for gnocchi is either a bolognese or classic butter and cheese. This sauce was too watery, so it didn't really stick to the gnocchi.
