Fresh/Stuffed Pasta & Gnocchi--Cook-Off 13

[Chris Amirault]

To accompany some sausages I made over at the sausage cook-off, I made a tomato sauce using bacon, onions, garlic, crushed tomatoes, sage, bay, and pinches of allspice and clove. I was going to use dried spaghetti because I was worried about fresh standing up to the sauce, but changed my mind. I was glad I did. I used Moby's base recipe from the eGCI course but made sure to flour very liberally during the rolling. I rolled it down to 4 on the KitchenAid and then cut it. It turned out great!

[melkor]

Since Chris is bringing this topic back up I might as well post a pic of our dinner last night. 100 grams semolina, 100 grams AP flour, 2 eggs, and a large pinch of salt. Let the dough rest for a bit, rolled out to 7 on the Belpasta Trattorina. Cut the dough on a chitarra. The pasta cooked for all of a minute then tossed with cream and mascarpone. Black truffle shaved on top. We regularly make this dish (sans truffle) after foraging for mushrooms - chanterelles and hedgehogs work particularly well in the sauce.

[slkinsey]

Looks good! Interesting that you cut it on a chitarra. Any particular reason why? When I do that -- and when I've had pasta alla chitarra in Abruzzo -- it's tended to be fairly thick (almost square) and rustic (I'll roll it by hand rather than in a machine).

[melkor]

I think the pasta has a better texture after being cut with the wires than it does using the cutting rollers in my pasta machine. I use a knife for more rustic preparations. The pasta cooks to an even thickness with well defined corners after cutting it with a knife or wires and after running it through the cutters it ends up pinched on the sides and thicker in the center. The problem is most likely that the cutters on my pasta machine are dull, but I had the same results with my old atlas machine also.

The other side of my chitarra has narrowly spaced wires that work well for making squared off pasta roughly the width of spaghetti. Mostly though, I use the chitarra because I enjoy the process - if it produced an equal quality product I'd still use it, that the end result is to my taste significantly better is a nice bonus.

[slkinsey]

Ah! You used the wide side of the chitarra. You know, I've never used that side. Never actually made pasta from that side. It may be that my wide side is a lot wider than yours as well. I got mine from friends in Abruzzo, and it's nothing like the ones I've seen for sale here (which tend to look like this one, whereas mine looks like the one on this page).

Your point is very well made about the pasta cutters that come with machines, though. I've never been happy with them. Even brand-new they don't separate the pasta strands to the extent that I would prefer, and you do get that "pinching" effect you describe. I prefer to simply roll the finished sheets of pasta into a cigar and cut them into whatever width I would like using a sharp knife.

The chitarra is cool to use, though, isn't it? I've been needing to re-wire mine so I can use them again (I have two). After a while, the wires seem to get stretched out too much. When I rewire, I also plan to quadruple wire each strand on the wide side so the strength of the wires on the two sides is more evenly balanced when the chitarra is tightened. With only single wiring for each strand on the wide side, the narrow side has about 5 times the number of wires compared to the wide side.

[melkor]

My chitarra looks a lot like what you have. Sur la table sells it for $21. The way the wires are rigged some of the pegs are wired with an even number of wires to each side others are 2:1, the fewest any of them have is 4 going each way. It's got 5mm spacing on one side, 2.5mm on the other. I think you're right that you get the same quality pasta using a sharp knife as you do a chitarra, though the chitarra has exact spacing so the end result is more uniform. How wide is the wide side of your chitarra?

[slkinsey]

Yea, that one from SLT looks a lot like mine. I'll have to take a look, but I'd swear that mine have five wires on the narrow side for every one wire on the wide side.

I'll try to remember to get mine down and look.

[Chris Amirault]

Using Moby's great recipe, I made fresh spaghetti tonight, and served it with my first San Marzano tomato sauce (sauteed garlic in evoo, the can o' tomatoes, salt, pepper, little wine, and chiffonaded basil just before serving) -- excellent.

The occasion of this meal was discovering, at the IKEA in Stoughton MA, the Frost clothes drying rack. Little does IKEA know, but this is an outstanding pasta drying rack. I installed it just above my head, and used it throughout the rolling and cutting process.

[JasonTrue]

I finally had a camera ready to go when making squash gnocchi (kabocha gnocchi) with cream sauce...

I stole the concept from an Italian restaurant I visited in Ginza many years ago. It's a kabocha and potato-based gnocchi with a sauce made from the same squash, cream, and butter.

Details in blog entry

[TongoRad]

Last night Lady Rad was out of the house, meaning that I could eat as late as I wanted to. This was an opportunity to play that I just could not refuse- normally I would have done the same sort of dish that I wound up making but it would've been with dried pasta instead of the gnocchi.

Here are my humble ingredients:

A potato, sausages and some sauteed broccoli rabe.

And here is my weapon of choice (well...necessity, actually, seeing as I don't have a ricer)- grandma's Foley:

I put the potato in the oven while I got the kids to bed. It was ready when I was. The food mill worked well enough for one potato but the holes were getting kind of clogged by the end of the process. I really do need to get a ricer because this was easy to do even when time is tight and I would like to make gnocchi more often. I started at 7:30 and was eating by 8:15, and that included quite a bit of cleanup time in between.

Here is my dinner for one:

I really like to caramelize my sausage for this dish, and I prefer not to blanch my broccoli rabe so the flavors are pretty aggressive. Once the gnocchi came to the top of the water I added them to the pan with the other ingredients along with a ladle of water, allowing them to cook a bit longer with the other flavors. When I turned off the heat I added two pats of butter and gave it all a toss before serving.

The final verdict was that the gnocchi were a bit too soft and delicate for the rest of the dish, though flavor-wise it is a classic. Orichietti is still the way to go, but I really enjoyed my gnocchi making experience and can see myself doing it more in the future.

[Chris Amirault]

Looks great. What gnocchi recipe did you use?

[TongoRad]

Looks great. What gnocchi recipe did you use?

←

Thanks, Chris. I guess I should've made note of that, though I really didn't follow a recipe. Once the hot potato was milled I spread it thin up the sides of a large bowl to allow the steam to come off. Then I kept adding all purpose flour a little at a time until it felt like it was holding together. They were made and shaped in under 10 minutes. One of the reasons I would like to keep up with it now is so that I get the 'feel' part of it down pat- if I understood the technique a little better last night I could have made them a little less fluffy.

[Swisskaese]

I made pumpkin gnocchi with a brown butter and fried sage sauce. They turned out nice.

I used Kabocha pumpkin which is the same type they have in Italy. This is the only kind of pumpkin available here and I had to add more flour than I do for the spinach gnocchi, but they still turned out light and fluffy.

Edited April 1, 2006 by Swisskaese (log)

[little ms foodie]

I made up some gnocchi using pate choux last week and froze the extras after cooking them in simmering water. Do I need to re simmer them or just let them defrost in the fridge and then stick them in the saute pan with the sauce?

[snowangel]

I made up some gnocchi using pate choux last week and froze the extras after cooking them in simmering water. Do I need to re simmer them or just let them defrost in the fridge and then stick them in the saute pan with the sauce?

←

Wendy, I asked my BIL about this, and he says they are like pot stickers -- cook them frozen. He said last time he thawed them in the fridge, he had a nasty mess.

[little ms foodie]

Thank you!!!

[kutsu]

Sorry if I repeat something already posted:

I've just bought a pasta machine and run some test dough through the machine. The dough handled fine, but after putting it through the cutter for wide ribbon, and placed it in a bag with semoline flour.

Come 5 minutes later, all the dough had badly balled up.

What's the best way of stopping fresh ribbon pasta sticking together after being cut? some way of drying it out somewhat?

[Chris Amirault]

I'm not sure I'm following the question, but if I get it, here's a suggestion: dust it well with flour and hang it from a pasta (or laundry) rack instead of putting it in a bag. Floured towels and a big table also work.

[kutsu]

I'm not sure I'm following the question, but if I get it, here's a suggestion: dust it well with flour and hang it from a pasta (or laundry) rack instead of putting it in a bag. Floured towels and a big table also work.

←

Ahh that's what I was doing wrong. How silly.

Much appreciated.

[kellytree]

we made these today cooked in chicken broth:

[kellytree]

and also this:

[Chufi]

This month, a bunch of us are cooking our way through Emilia Romagna, where some of the most gorgeous fresh and stuffed pasta comes from.

Here is some I made recently:

spinachlasagna bolognese

and spinach tortellini, stuffed with mashed potatoes & chives

I used Marcella Hazan's recipe for the spinach dough, but found I had to use a LOT more flour than she stated, and the dough was still reall wet and sticky.

The color of the dough improved dramatically after a few days though (even if the texture didn't). From flecked with green, it turned to a uniformly bright green dough. Really beautiful. So I would recommend always leaving spinach dough for at least a day before using.

[Live It Up]

I see that a few of you have made the ricotta gnocchi from Molto Italiano , so I was hoping I could get some advice. I've made gnocchi several times before, but never this recipe. I want to make them for dinner tomorrow night, but I will not be home to make them right before dinner. If I made them in the afternoon, could I simply refrigerate them until dinner time (5 hours or so), or should I cook them and reheat? Or should I freeze them? Thanks!

[Shaya]

I would boil them today until just-cooked and tomorrow finish by sauteeing in butter. You can make them crispy or not. I like them slightly crispy. Here are the ones I made this summer:

[Live It Up]

Thanks for the advice, Shaya. Your gnocchi look amazing, of course. I re-read the recipe and it actually called for reheating the cooked gnocchi in boiling water. I was planning to make the dish for some friends for dinner on saturday night, and because I was planning on serving it as a main course I decided to make a double batch. So I set 3 lbs of ricotta to drain in the fridge. But then I got sick and had to cancel the dinner on sat., so then I had to make a ridiculous number of gnocchi for just me and my husband on sunday. There has to be a typo in that recipe, because Batali calls for using 2 tablespoons of "dough" for each gnoccho. I only used 2 teaspoons each, and they were still huge because they expand when they cook. Here's a pic

I didn't have any parsley, so that's why they're so white, and I didn't have any fennel bulb, so the sauce is an improvised sausage ragu, not the recipe that's in the book. I thought they were good, but really filling and rich. I probably wouldn't make them again, as I prefer the spinach ricotta gnocchi recipe from Marcella Hazan that I usually use. Oh yeah, and we're still eating them because a double batch makes A LOT of them.