Beautiful little hearty doughballs, gnocchi can either be a near-religious experience of tummy-expanding deliciousness or else wind up as gummy lead weights of sadness. Usually gnocchi are made out of pre-cooked riced potatoes, maybe a beaten egg, and just enough flour to turn the mess into dough, but nowadays chefs seem to be experimenting with this formula-- for example, but using sweet potato instead or plain old Yukon Gold, or even butternut squash or beets!-- in order to make more interesting pasta. I thought of this two nights ago when the result of roasting a fine kabocha squash turned out somewhat less than satisfactory. It tasted good, something subtly like a yam and pumpkin, it was just super dry even though I had baked it under foil. I guess that's why it's usually simmered in something instead.
Reading this post the other day about home-made gnocchi, though, was what sealed the fate of my sad roasted kabocha wedges. It came as somewhat of a revelation: you don't need a ricer to make gnocchi! Just a grater! Ricing the hot potatoes is just a way to allow a maximum amount of steam to escape them. More escaped steam leads to dryer potatoes which leads to needing less flour in the pasta which leads to lighter, pillowier gnocchi. So, I thought to myself I'd grate up that near-dessicated kabocha that I wouldn't be eating as-is anyway and try my hand at making some of this wonderful intimidating pasta.
It was really easier than I would have thought. As usual I used no particular recipe. I grated basically the entire kabocha, added in a lightly beaten egg, salt, pepper, and Italian seasoning to taste, and then used a big spoon to conservatively scoop only as much flour as was absolutely necessary to turn the damp shreds of squash into something that felt like dough. It worked out to maybe about a cup of flour. Once the dough was workable-- no longer crumbly or sticky-- I formed it into three large balls and began rolling them out. Not flat, like this:
It almost felt like Play-Doh, but didn't crack even as the tube got longer and longer:
Here you can see an entire tube of proto-gnocchi, a dish filled with some of the pillowy cuts from previous tubes, and some of the rolled finished gnocchi. You can also see the cast off kabocha skin in the right corner, a ton of drying dishes in the back, and a wad of paper towel desperately trying to protect the pasta against the leaky sink on the left. Oh college.
Anyway, once you roll out the pasta log nice and thin, you just cut them into cubes about 1/2 inch square:
Now is the fun part: shaping them. I'm only being semi-ironic, as I really do think that rolling them is pretty fun, though after a while I can see how it becomes a huge pain. If you had a gnocchi board, you'd just lay the little pillows on it and use your thumb to curl it up, pressing it into the ridges. As I obviously don't have a gnocchi board since I have too much kitchen junk as it is to have such a unitasker (though think of all the "grooved butter balls" I could make!!!), I just used an ordinary fork, like so:
You think this looks complicated? Try doing it lefty while trying to take a picture in a room with the shadowiest ceiling light in the world. It's really not that difficult at all, though, to make the nice little curl and ridges you see at the top of this post. Just smush the gnocchi pillow onto the tines on the back of a fork, then gently roll it onto itself with your thumb (or other hand, like I did). It'll take a while to do this, but they cook more evenly and hold more sauce this way. If you get lazy or simply prefer another shape, you can just use your knuckle to make a crater in the center of the pillows.
The pasta police won't kill you, I promise. (Just tell them I told you it was ok.)
You can cook the gnocchi as soon as you're done shaping them if you want to eat them right away. Just boil them until they float to the top. However, since one small kabocha worth of dough made close to 200 gnocchi, and since it's hard to eat more than a couple dozen without dying, I have plenty of pasta to last me through the rest of the semester*! If you don't have a bottomless gnocchi pit either, simply lay out all your gnocchi in a single layer on one or two (however many it takes) cookie sheets and freeze them. As soon as they're frozen you can pour them into a gallon ziplock bag or the like and you'll be able to take out as many as you want individually next time you want to eat them. Just put them straight from the freezer into your pot.
Potato gnocchi are always delicious, and I encourage you to go make some of your own. Don't trust frozen supermarket ones-- I've never eaten a good one. However, I hope you've been inspired by my unusual orange gnocchi and will think about innovating this perfect pasta with outcast veggies your own! After all, if the ingredients are 90% squash, doesn't that mean that they count as vegetables themselves? ;)
*Edit for Jan. 27, 2009: Ok, I officially ate all of them.Your gnocchi gnoshing rate may vary :).
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