As we're currently not allowed to visit our favourite restaurants, I've been making an effort to cook 'restaurant style' meals at home, and using this extra time to make everything from scratch. I have some cook books published by my favourite restaurants {This one from Polpo and this one from Dishoom are my faves!} and they've been great for recreating the restaurant experience at home, but I've also been learning how to make some of the ingredients from scratch instead of just purchasing them in a bag {yes I am the typical millennial in lockdown caring for my Sourdough starter 😅}. I posted this 'how to' on my Instagram Stories the other day and the response was so great that I thought I'd also pop it up on here for future reference!
To make gnocchi, you simply need 500g potatoes with the skins on, 130g 00 flour although I'm sure plain flour also works, and 1 egg...so it's a great recipe to make when you have limited supplies.
The first thing you'll need to do is boil your 500g of potatoes (any kind work) until they're just cooked, they should be soft all the way through. Then drain the water and leave the potatoes to cool, when they're cool enough to handle peel off the skin and leave to cool completely. Cooking the potatoes with their skins on mean that they keep more of their flavour which will make your gnocchi even more delicious!
Once your potatoes are cooled, you want to grate them and make a 'well' in your mixing bowl. Then crack your egg into the well and mix together until you have a wet mixture.
Add your 00 pasta flour to the mixture and knead until you have a dough, you may need more than 130g if your dough is particularly wet, as it should be dry enough to not stick to a surface.
Once you have your dough formed, place the ball onto a floured surface and cut into quarters. Roll out each quarter into a sausage shape using your hands. The sausage should be around 1cm in diameter and then cut into 1cm pieces that look like little parcels.
To add grooves to your gnocchi, roll each piece along a butter curler {if you don't have one of these then a fork also works!}. Adding grooves means that the gnocchi will hold the sauce better and be more flavoursome.
When your gnocchi looks like this, it's ready to be cooked! Bring a pan of salted water to the boil and pop your gnocchi into the pan. When the gnocchi floats, it means its cooked and is ready to be transferred to your sauce! My favourite sauce recipe for this is tomato and mascarpone, topped with shavings of pecorino cheese...I'll also pop my sauce recipe below for anyone interested.
To make the tomato and mascarpone sauce you'll need 1 can tinned tomatoes, 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar and 250ml vegetable stock, 1 teaspoon dried basil {or fresh if you have it} and 150g mascarpone cheese. Simply put all of the ingredients into a pan apart from the mascarpone, bring to the boil and simmer for 15 mins, then stir in the mascarpone until it's melted and you're good to go!
I hope you liked this recipe and the step by step photos were helpful! Please do let me know in the comments if you've tried this yourself or if you'd like to see more recipes on here!
xo Becky
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