Recipe: Gnocchi with Garlicky Bechamel
Apr. 12th, 2008 06:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coraaOver the next few days, I'm going to post several recipes that I've made in the past week or so. This is the first: gnocchi with garlicky bechamel and other stuff. I used chicken for my 'stuff.' I like chicken, it's tasty with gnocchi, and it made a good bechamel base. But you could use all kinds of other things -- including making it vegetarian, although not vegan -- and I'll put notes on how to do that at the end.
Also, first a bit of warning. This isn't the kind of recipe where I can tell you to take two potatoes and half a cup of flour and you'll be able to just follow the instructions to the letter. Like a lot of things, gnocchi is really dependent on your personal circumstances -- how big are your potatoes? How much water and starch do they contain? How much moisture is in the air, in your flour, how big is your egg, how much cheese do you like? So this is a method-recipe for certain, and you'll have to make some judgment calls, but I'll do my best to explain what those are and how to make them. And if anything doesn't make sense to you, feel free to ask.
And an obligatory note on authenticity: There are a million ways to make gnocchi. Some contain ricotta, some don't; some rely on spinach for structure, some don't; some have potatoes, some don't. Mine is a potato-cheesy dumpling. I make no pretense that my method is authentic. I just happen to think it tastes good.
There are three components: the gnocchi, the Stuff, and the sauce.
The Gnocchi
For the gnocchi, you will need:
You'll be working with your hands a lot in this one, so be prepared to wash them frequently -- both to keep them clean for food handling, and to get gnocchi goop off them. ;)
The first thing you do is boil the potatoes in their jackets until they're quite tender and a fork goes in easily, just like you would for mashed potatoes. Drain the water off and pour cold water over top, and let 'em sit just until they're cool enough to handle. Then remove the skins, which should peel right off in your fingers. (You can peel the potatoes first, too, if you prefer, but they'll be a little bit more gluey because the starches aren't as much protected from swelling/bursting. But still perfectly edible.) Then mash them (don't try to leave the skins on, though, even if you usually eat skins-on mashed potatoes); you want them as smooth as possible. I use a potato ricer, and a food mill or mixer would work too, or a hand masher if you just try to be thorough.
Put the mashed potatoes out on a flat surface. You can use a large cutting board or a clean counter, whichever you'd be less unhappy scraping gnocchi dough off. ;) I use a large flexible mat cutting board I got from Ikea (which has been seriously awesome, and cheap too). Mound 'em up like a small potato mountain, and then push down in the middle to make a well. In the well, crack your eggs. Add salt and pepper, depending on how much you like salt and pepper. (Do be aware that you'll be adding your cheese -- if you picked a really salty cheese, decrease salt accordingly. You can also add the salt after the cheese has gone in, but it's more difficult to mix thoroughly.)
With your hands, work the egg into the potatoes until you have a large, very soft, slightly sloppy pile of basically mashed potatoes with egg. If it's not slightly sloppy -- if it's firm and dry -- you might have very dry/starchy potatoes, in which case it might be a good idea to add a bit more egg. That should be a rare situation, though; generally, what you have will be wet.
Mound it up again, make another well, and add your shredded cheese. Again, using your hands, work the two together until what you have is a large, slightly less sloppy pile of cheesy mashed potatoes. So far so good!
Now the somewhat more complicated part. Basically, what you need to do is add just enough flour to make a smooth lump of dough that sort of holds its shape, rather than a lump of damp potatoes, since damp potatoes with too little flour binder will just fall apart rather than form nice little dumplings. But you want it to be a soft, moist dough -- if you add too much, what you'll have at the end is hard little gutbullets, not tender little gnocchi. This is why you can't just add X amount of flour and call it good: you need the flour to absorb and bind just enough of the moisture but not too much, and that depends so much on environmental factors that vary from batch to batch and place to place. So you've got to add flour until it feels right.
That said, it's really not all that hard to do. Again, mound up your potatoes and make a well, and add maybe 1/4 cup of flour to start. I just put a couple of cups of flour in a bowl and use the measuring cup as a scoop. Sprinkle the flour into the well and then gently work it into the dough. Repeat and keep repeating until the dough goes from being wet to being sticky. Keep adding flour, watching carefully. What will happen when the dough has nearly absorbed enough flour is that it will -- surprisingly quickly! -- turn into a smooth, contiguous lump. You'll be able to pick it up one-handed, and though it'll drip over your wrist eventually, it'll sort of hold together. Once that happens, you'll probably want to add one more 1/4 cup of flour to make it a tiny bit stiffer, and then you're done.
At this point, I like to put the gnocchi into a bowl in the fridge and start on the Other Stuff, because it's true of almost all doughs that they're easier to work with if they're a little bit chilled. If you aren't going to use all your gnocchi dough, you can stick some in a plastic bag and refrigerate (to cook later the same week) or freeze (to cook in, mm, the next couple months). But you can also roll out right now.
First thing: wash and dry your hands. Dough sticks to dough, and you'll have a devil of a time doing this if your hands are doughy. Similarly, clean off your work surface so you can roll out somewhere clean and dry.
Split the gnocchi dough into portions you can work with easily -- I usually go with about 1/4 of the dough at a time -- and keep one portion out while chucking the rest back in the fridge. Flour your work surface to discourage the dough from sticking, and flour your hands for the same reason (or you can oil your hands if you find that works better). Form your gnocchi into little gnocchis -- rolling the dough out into a tube and chopping off works, pulling off bits works, whatever you like. Bear in mind that the flour and egg will cause them to expand when they hit the water -- remember how I said mine looked like asteroids? That was two things: not accounting for swelling, and getting lazy. If you want nicely-shapped gnocchi, and aren't feeling terminally lazy, try to roll and cut or pinch so you have small, even lozenges. You can roll them a little to round them off.
Traditional gnocchi has a ridged side on it. I didn't bother this time (see above re: lazy), but it's pretty easy to do: just press the back of a fork against each gnocchi.
(If you are feeling terminally lazy, just spoon out chunks and roll them vaguely round. They'll still cook fine as long as they're not too huge, and I won't tell anyone.)
You'll want to boil them in batches, so you don't crowd the pot too much. You can either make up all your dumplings at once and then cook them in batches, or roll some, cook some, roll some, cook some. In either case, you'll need somewhere warm to store the first batches so they don't get too cool before the last are done. A plate in a 200 degree oven is a good holding place.
To cook: fill a pot with a good deal of water and bring to a simmer. Add enough gnocchi that the pot has one layer of gnocchi but they're not sitting on top of one another. Simmer them like pasta until done. How can you tell when they're done? Beautiful thing about gnocchi: when they're done, they come popping up to the surface and float. Just scoop them out and keep warm in the oven or serve.
(Cooked gnocchi doesn't keep and reheat all that well; it gets gelatinous and gluey, and/or falls apart. But gnocchi dough fridges or freezes beautifully. If you've refrigerated it, just let it warm up to where you can roll it out, and go from there. If you've freezered it, defrost in the fridge [or zap in the microwave, but be careful to use very low power or you'll cook the egg], and then roll out. If you've rolled out a bunch and realize that you're not going to use 'em all, you can freeze gnocchi all made up, too, and then drop them straight into boiling water in their frozen state. They'll just take a few more minutes to cook.)
The Stuff
I like chicken, the people I was feeding like chicken, so chicken it was -- but gnocchi is like pasta, you can serve it with practically anything. A lot of gnocchi recipes basically call for tossing the finished gnocchi in melted butter and sprinkling with a little minched fresh sage and parmesan, which sounds pretty good to me. Or you can serve them in a tomato sauce, or an alfredo sauce, with steamed or sauteed vegetables, with thinly-sliced seared steak, with meatballs... anything you'd eat with chunky pasta or with dumplings will work for gnocchi. You can also add them to soups; once the soup is completely done and just simmering at the end, add the gnocchi until they start to float, and serve.
But what I did is marinated chicken and garlicky bechamel, which goes like this:
(Note that, if you're making garlicky bechamel, you can reuse a lot of the marinade components in the sauce.)
Cut the chicken breast into bite-size pieces.
Melt the butter over low heat so that it liquefies without spitting and browning. Smash or mince the garlic and add it to the butter, and let the whole thing heat gently -- still over low heat -- until the garlic has infused into the butter, 5-10 minutes. Don't let the garlic brown.
Add the vinegar or other acidic ingredient, and salt and pepper to taste. Let the butter cool a little so that it's warm but not hot to the touch, and then toss with the chicken. Let marinate for a bit, as long as you have -- at least 15-30 minutes of that should be at room temp, but the rest of the time should be in the fridge to ward off the salmonella monster. The butter will solidify. This is fine. If you need to desolidify it in a hurry to cook the chicken, you can always zap it in the microwave -- just use less than 50% heat or you'll cook the chicken.
When you're ready to cook the chicken, let the butter soften and fish out the chicken pieces. Sear them until brown on the outside and cooked through -- I use a heavy cast-iron pan, because I love cast iron, but any skillet will work. They should get a nice reddish-brown coating, and be firm rather than squishy, but if you are paranoid about raw chicken you can aways pick out the thickest one and slice it through to make sure it's cooked all the way. Then keep them warm in a 200F oven while you make your bechamel in the same pan, or if you aren't making a bechamel, serve immediately.
The Sauce
For 2 1/2 to 3 cups of sauce (reduce as necessary for smaller batches):
If you made your Stuff in a pan -- seared chicken, seared steaks, made meatballs, sauteed vegetables, whatever -- go ahead and use the same pan; you'll be able to recoup some wonderful flavors from the stuff stuck to the bottom of it. Add butter (either new or, if you made the garlic chicken, the reserved marinade). If you aren't using reserved marinade, put about half of your minced garlic in the pan with the butter. Stir as it heats, scraping the bottom to bring up the brown bits (fond), if there are any, stuck to the pan. Let heat until barely sizzling, and sprinkle on the flour. Stir and cook a couple minutes more, to make a fairly stiff roux. If it's more liquid than paste, add a little bit more flour, but it should be a soft paste, not a firm/dry one.
Pour on the liquid. I used two cups of milk plus one cup of fairly concentrated chicken broth. You can use vegetable broth, beef broth, more milk... basically whatever goes with your Stuff. (I'd stay away from acids like wine or lemon juice, though, as I suspect they might make the milk curdle. But you can experiment.) Also add the remaining minced garlic. Stir or whisk continuously and keep cooking over medium heat until the liquid starts to come together into a thick, smooth sauce. It will be somewhere in the range from cream-colored to tan, depending on whether you had brown bits at the bottom of your pan when you started. Once it's nicely thick, salt and pepper to taste, remove from the heat, and mix with your gnocchi and Stuff.
Now I'm hungry.
Also, first a bit of warning. This isn't the kind of recipe where I can tell you to take two potatoes and half a cup of flour and you'll be able to just follow the instructions to the letter. Like a lot of things, gnocchi is really dependent on your personal circumstances -- how big are your potatoes? How much water and starch do they contain? How much moisture is in the air, in your flour, how big is your egg, how much cheese do you like? So this is a method-recipe for certain, and you'll have to make some judgment calls, but I'll do my best to explain what those are and how to make them. And if anything doesn't make sense to you, feel free to ask.
And an obligatory note on authenticity: There are a million ways to make gnocchi. Some contain ricotta, some don't; some rely on spinach for structure, some don't; some have potatoes, some don't. Mine is a potato-cheesy dumpling. I make no pretense that my method is authentic. I just happen to think it tastes good.
There are three components: the gnocchi, the Stuff, and the sauce.
The Gnocchi
For the gnocchi, you will need:
- Russet potatoes, about 1/2 to 3/4 lb per person, depending on appetite. Estimating high is not a bad plan. Gnocchi dough refrigerates well and can be used again later. Also note that a starchy potato makes this recipe a lot easier and better; save your beautiful little red potatoes or fingerlings or whatever for something else. (Starchy yellow potatoes, like Yukon Gold, are fine.)
- One egg per two pounds of potatoes. Yes, this makes it hard to make small amounts, so you can either beat the egg and use half of it, or make a bigger batch of dough and fridge/freeze the excess.
- Salt
- Pepper
- Shredded cheese, about 1/4 cup per pound of potatoes, or more if you really like cheese -- you can probably go up to 1/2 cup per pound of potatoes without messing things up too much. Any kind of cheese you like will work, so long as it's not too soft (ie, not so much with the camembert) or too wet (fresh mozzarellas = no go, although firm American mozz is fine). I used roughly equal parts of shredded parmesan, shredded myzithra, some kind of Swiss that had lost its label, and some leftover preshredded mozzarella that I wanted to use up. You can use just one cheese or five, as you like.
- Flour. You should estimate 1/2 to 3/4 cup per pound of potatoes if you want to make sure you have enough, but seriously, this is the one thing you really can't just measure.
You'll be working with your hands a lot in this one, so be prepared to wash them frequently -- both to keep them clean for food handling, and to get gnocchi goop off them. ;)
The first thing you do is boil the potatoes in their jackets until they're quite tender and a fork goes in easily, just like you would for mashed potatoes. Drain the water off and pour cold water over top, and let 'em sit just until they're cool enough to handle. Then remove the skins, which should peel right off in your fingers. (You can peel the potatoes first, too, if you prefer, but they'll be a little bit more gluey because the starches aren't as much protected from swelling/bursting. But still perfectly edible.) Then mash them (don't try to leave the skins on, though, even if you usually eat skins-on mashed potatoes); you want them as smooth as possible. I use a potato ricer, and a food mill or mixer would work too, or a hand masher if you just try to be thorough.
Put the mashed potatoes out on a flat surface. You can use a large cutting board or a clean counter, whichever you'd be less unhappy scraping gnocchi dough off. ;) I use a large flexible mat cutting board I got from Ikea (which has been seriously awesome, and cheap too). Mound 'em up like a small potato mountain, and then push down in the middle to make a well. In the well, crack your eggs. Add salt and pepper, depending on how much you like salt and pepper. (Do be aware that you'll be adding your cheese -- if you picked a really salty cheese, decrease salt accordingly. You can also add the salt after the cheese has gone in, but it's more difficult to mix thoroughly.)
With your hands, work the egg into the potatoes until you have a large, very soft, slightly sloppy pile of basically mashed potatoes with egg. If it's not slightly sloppy -- if it's firm and dry -- you might have very dry/starchy potatoes, in which case it might be a good idea to add a bit more egg. That should be a rare situation, though; generally, what you have will be wet.
Mound it up again, make another well, and add your shredded cheese. Again, using your hands, work the two together until what you have is a large, slightly less sloppy pile of cheesy mashed potatoes. So far so good!
Now the somewhat more complicated part. Basically, what you need to do is add just enough flour to make a smooth lump of dough that sort of holds its shape, rather than a lump of damp potatoes, since damp potatoes with too little flour binder will just fall apart rather than form nice little dumplings. But you want it to be a soft, moist dough -- if you add too much, what you'll have at the end is hard little gutbullets, not tender little gnocchi. This is why you can't just add X amount of flour and call it good: you need the flour to absorb and bind just enough of the moisture but not too much, and that depends so much on environmental factors that vary from batch to batch and place to place. So you've got to add flour until it feels right.
That said, it's really not all that hard to do. Again, mound up your potatoes and make a well, and add maybe 1/4 cup of flour to start. I just put a couple of cups of flour in a bowl and use the measuring cup as a scoop. Sprinkle the flour into the well and then gently work it into the dough. Repeat and keep repeating until the dough goes from being wet to being sticky. Keep adding flour, watching carefully. What will happen when the dough has nearly absorbed enough flour is that it will -- surprisingly quickly! -- turn into a smooth, contiguous lump. You'll be able to pick it up one-handed, and though it'll drip over your wrist eventually, it'll sort of hold together. Once that happens, you'll probably want to add one more 1/4 cup of flour to make it a tiny bit stiffer, and then you're done.
At this point, I like to put the gnocchi into a bowl in the fridge and start on the Other Stuff, because it's true of almost all doughs that they're easier to work with if they're a little bit chilled. If you aren't going to use all your gnocchi dough, you can stick some in a plastic bag and refrigerate (to cook later the same week) or freeze (to cook in, mm, the next couple months). But you can also roll out right now.
First thing: wash and dry your hands. Dough sticks to dough, and you'll have a devil of a time doing this if your hands are doughy. Similarly, clean off your work surface so you can roll out somewhere clean and dry.
Split the gnocchi dough into portions you can work with easily -- I usually go with about 1/4 of the dough at a time -- and keep one portion out while chucking the rest back in the fridge. Flour your work surface to discourage the dough from sticking, and flour your hands for the same reason (or you can oil your hands if you find that works better). Form your gnocchi into little gnocchis -- rolling the dough out into a tube and chopping off works, pulling off bits works, whatever you like. Bear in mind that the flour and egg will cause them to expand when they hit the water -- remember how I said mine looked like asteroids? That was two things: not accounting for swelling, and getting lazy. If you want nicely-shapped gnocchi, and aren't feeling terminally lazy, try to roll and cut or pinch so you have small, even lozenges. You can roll them a little to round them off.
Traditional gnocchi has a ridged side on it. I didn't bother this time (see above re: lazy), but it's pretty easy to do: just press the back of a fork against each gnocchi.
(If you are feeling terminally lazy, just spoon out chunks and roll them vaguely round. They'll still cook fine as long as they're not too huge, and I won't tell anyone.)
You'll want to boil them in batches, so you don't crowd the pot too much. You can either make up all your dumplings at once and then cook them in batches, or roll some, cook some, roll some, cook some. In either case, you'll need somewhere warm to store the first batches so they don't get too cool before the last are done. A plate in a 200 degree oven is a good holding place.
To cook: fill a pot with a good deal of water and bring to a simmer. Add enough gnocchi that the pot has one layer of gnocchi but they're not sitting on top of one another. Simmer them like pasta until done. How can you tell when they're done? Beautiful thing about gnocchi: when they're done, they come popping up to the surface and float. Just scoop them out and keep warm in the oven or serve.
(Cooked gnocchi doesn't keep and reheat all that well; it gets gelatinous and gluey, and/or falls apart. But gnocchi dough fridges or freezes beautifully. If you've refrigerated it, just let it warm up to where you can roll it out, and go from there. If you've freezered it, defrost in the fridge [or zap in the microwave, but be careful to use very low power or you'll cook the egg], and then roll out. If you've rolled out a bunch and realize that you're not going to use 'em all, you can freeze gnocchi all made up, too, and then drop them straight into boiling water in their frozen state. They'll just take a few more minutes to cook.)
The Stuff
I like chicken, the people I was feeding like chicken, so chicken it was -- but gnocchi is like pasta, you can serve it with practically anything. A lot of gnocchi recipes basically call for tossing the finished gnocchi in melted butter and sprinkling with a little minched fresh sage and parmesan, which sounds pretty good to me. Or you can serve them in a tomato sauce, or an alfredo sauce, with steamed or sauteed vegetables, with thinly-sliced seared steak, with meatballs... anything you'd eat with chunky pasta or with dumplings will work for gnocchi. You can also add them to soups; once the soup is completely done and just simmering at the end, add the gnocchi until they start to float, and serve.
But what I did is marinated chicken and garlicky bechamel, which goes like this:
- Raw chicken breast. I usually go with 1/2 to 1 breast fillet per person, but thighs work fine, and any amount works fine too.
- Butter, enough to coat the chicken breast. For four fillets to feed five people, I used half a stick.
- Garlic. I really like garlic, so used four cloves here. Use less if you aren't totally vampireproof already.
- Rice wine vinegar, or something else acidic like white wine or lemon juice, about 1 tbsp.
- Salt
- Pepper
(Note that, if you're making garlicky bechamel, you can reuse a lot of the marinade components in the sauce.)
Cut the chicken breast into bite-size pieces.
Melt the butter over low heat so that it liquefies without spitting and browning. Smash or mince the garlic and add it to the butter, and let the whole thing heat gently -- still over low heat -- until the garlic has infused into the butter, 5-10 minutes. Don't let the garlic brown.
Add the vinegar or other acidic ingredient, and salt and pepper to taste. Let the butter cool a little so that it's warm but not hot to the touch, and then toss with the chicken. Let marinate for a bit, as long as you have -- at least 15-30 minutes of that should be at room temp, but the rest of the time should be in the fridge to ward off the salmonella monster. The butter will solidify. This is fine. If you need to desolidify it in a hurry to cook the chicken, you can always zap it in the microwave -- just use less than 50% heat or you'll cook the chicken.
When you're ready to cook the chicken, let the butter soften and fish out the chicken pieces. Sear them until brown on the outside and cooked through -- I use a heavy cast-iron pan, because I love cast iron, but any skillet will work. They should get a nice reddish-brown coating, and be firm rather than squishy, but if you are paranoid about raw chicken you can aways pick out the thickest one and slice it through to make sure it's cooked all the way. Then keep them warm in a 200F oven while you make your bechamel in the same pan, or if you aren't making a bechamel, serve immediately.
The Sauce
For 2 1/2 to 3 cups of sauce (reduce as necessary for smaller batches):
- 3-4 tbsp butter (or use the butter from the chicken marinade)
- 3-4 tbsp flour
- Garlic, to taste (I used the garlic in the chicken marinade, plus two more minced cloves, because I have lost the ability to detect garlic in anything less than epic quantities. Mileage may vary.)
- 2 cups of milk
- 1 cup of stock, or more milk
If you made your Stuff in a pan -- seared chicken, seared steaks, made meatballs, sauteed vegetables, whatever -- go ahead and use the same pan; you'll be able to recoup some wonderful flavors from the stuff stuck to the bottom of it. Add butter (either new or, if you made the garlic chicken, the reserved marinade). If you aren't using reserved marinade, put about half of your minced garlic in the pan with the butter. Stir as it heats, scraping the bottom to bring up the brown bits (fond), if there are any, stuck to the pan. Let heat until barely sizzling, and sprinkle on the flour. Stir and cook a couple minutes more, to make a fairly stiff roux. If it's more liquid than paste, add a little bit more flour, but it should be a soft paste, not a firm/dry one.
Pour on the liquid. I used two cups of milk plus one cup of fairly concentrated chicken broth. You can use vegetable broth, beef broth, more milk... basically whatever goes with your Stuff. (I'd stay away from acids like wine or lemon juice, though, as I suspect they might make the milk curdle. But you can experiment.) Also add the remaining minced garlic. Stir or whisk continuously and keep cooking over medium heat until the liquid starts to come together into a thick, smooth sauce. It will be somewhere in the range from cream-colored to tan, depending on whether you had brown bits at the bottom of your pan when you started. Once it's nicely thick, salt and pepper to taste, remove from the heat, and mix with your gnocchi and Stuff.
Now I'm hungry.
