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12 March 08
re: gnocchi, part the second |
| m-c: |
| Having read your hilarious piece about gnocchi and T's helpful comments, I decided to take a crack at the dish myself, using a different strategy. |
| mb: |
| I've been meaning to try it again myself, let's see if your story inspires me. |
| m-c: |
| My idea was to make them as Eastern European boiled dumplings and then bake them. |
| mb: |
| Aren't you going to do it up as a recipe? |
| m-c: |
| Umm, no. |
| For me the process wasn't problematic, but the result was unsatisfactory. Great flavor -- anything with that much Parmesan cheese in it has to be delicious -- but the texture ... I was looking for zaftig, as in plump, hearty, curvaceous. Instead I got elephantine. So I'll tell you about it, but nobody should follow in my footsteps. |
| mb: |
| Another contribution in a lifetime of devoted public service kind of thing? |
| m-c: |
| Correct. |
| I started by scaling Heidi's recipe back by half except that I changed the ratio of semolina to milk from her 3/5.5 to 1/1. I.e. where she uses 3 cups of semolina to 5.5 cups of milk, if I had just been scaling back I would have used 1.5 cups of semolina to 2.75 cups of milk. Instead I used a cup of semolina and a cup of milk. |
| mb: |
| Do me a table, please. |
| m-c: |
| Gladly. |
| Heidi | m-c in proportion |
m-c proportions changed |
|
| semolina | 3 cups | 1.5 cups | 1 cup |
| milk | 5.5 cups | 2.75 cups | 1 cup |
| mb: |
| Ahh, love those tables. |
| m-c: |
| I know, aren't they wonderful? Lists are the best, of course, but then tables right next in line. |
| OK, so I used a cup of goat milk, a cup of semolina, cooked 'em, slung in chopped-up dry-pack tomatoes (sun-dried tomatoes without the oil), butter, as much Parmesan cheese as the dough would hold, and then, after cooling off the dough, egg yolks. |
| My guess is that I should have made a looser batter, say 1 cup of semolina to 1.5 or even 2 cups of milk, and then have beaten the whole thing like crazy after adding the egg yolks. Instead I just worked the yolks in and then went immediately to the boiling stage. |
| mb: |
| Sounds like you were thinking of your grandmother again. |
| m-c: |
| I seldom do anything in the kitchen without tipping my hat to her. And dumplings were a specialty of hers. Being a modern woman, she made hers with Bisquick; now that Bisquick has come out with a trans-fat-free version I'll be trying it again. |
| But back to the gnocchi. Gnocchi means approximately "dumplings" in Italian, by the way, so I don't think I was doing anything too weird. If they had been great, I could have christened them gnocchi all'Alto Adige, after the half-Italian, half-German region of Italy also known as South Tyrol. |
| mb: |
| I remember that! Wasn't that where they were Italians but they had all cuckoo clocks and carved pine bedsteads? |
| m-c: |
| The very place. Mark got to use his German more than I did my Italian. So gnocchi of that region might well be half Italian, half German. But alas it was not meant to be. |
| I realized that I had gone wrong as the dumplings boiled because they all stayed at the bottom of the pot rather than bobbing up to the top as they should have. |
| mb: |
| What makes them bob up? |
| m-c: |
| There should be zillions of tiny air bubbles in the dough that expand with the heat as the dumplings boil, making them swell up and float. Their weight stays the same but the volume increases, so they become, in effect, lighter. |
| No such luck in this case -- they stayed bouncing around the bottom like miniature shaggy bowling balls. |
| So I knew the texture was going to be heavy but I boiled them to a fare‑thee‑well so they wouldn't be soggy as well as heavy. |
| Then I dried them off on paper towels, laid them in a well-greased baking dish, scattered more Parmesan cheese on top, and ran them under the broiler till they were crunchy on top. |
| mb: |
| And did you serve them with Heidi's red tomato sauce? |
| m-c: |
| No, Mark had just the weekend before made an outstanding red sauce from Nancy Verde Barr's We Called It Macaroni (Knopf, 1991, pages 79-81), and the memory was too fresh in my mind to risk anything less splendid. |
| Instead I went in a completely different direction and made soupmeat with vin cotto ("cooked wine," an Italian sweet-and-sour sauce) from a recipe in Mario Batali's Molto Italiano (Ecco, HarperCollins, 2005, pages 314-315). My so-called gnocchi were a D -- try again, try again -- but the sauce was an A. |
| mb: |
| Yes, I think we both need to try again. |
| m-c: |
| Yeah, I want to try T's idea about treating the dough like polenta but following my method for polenta, not his. |
| mb: |
| We could be working on this dish for a long, long time. |
| m-c: |
| OK by me. |
| mb: |
| Me too. |
Questions? Comments? Corrections?
Suggestions? Contributions?
Please let us know!
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