Gnocchi
I notice that some gnocchi recipes involve baking the potatoes and ricing them while they’re still hot while others involve boiling the potatoes, dry them in a pot on the stove top, and waiting until they’re cooled before ricing. Also, some recipes have a higher proportion of flour to potato and some has the opposite. How do these differences affect the outcome?
Comments
Good questions, Chi. In our gnocchi recipe, we recommend boiling the potatoes until tender, draining, and then drying them further in a hot pot back on the stove top. Our goal is cloudlike, airy gnocchi, meaning that we want to avoid anything that might produce dense or gummy texture. To that end, we are looking to minimize the moisture trapped inside the dough and to control gluten development. That's why we wait until the potatoes cool before ricing; as they cool, steam evaporates off the surface of the potatoes, and excess moisture drains through the wire rack. This is also why we use a comparatively small ratio of flour to potatoes: more flour produces a glutinous, chewy pasta, not the airy one we want. Using too little flour, however, results in a gummy texture reminiscent of overwhipped mashed potatoes. - April D.
If the goal is to reduce moisture, wouldn’t baking the potatoes introduce less water than boiling them? Also, wouldn’t ricing them into small bits while they’re hot releases more steam than if they cool as big chunks?
Hi Chi - Baking whole potatoes would definitely introduce less water than boiling but it takes about 3x as long to bake potatoes (about 45 minutes at 450 degrees). And then you have to peel the scalding hot potatoes. We went with the shorter and more streamlined method of boiling and drying on the stovetop to achieve results that were pretty darn close when compared to baked potatoes. According to Diane Unger, the recipe developer, we tried ricing the potatoes both before and after cooling and found the texture of the gnocchi significantly better when we cooled the potatoes first and allowed the steam to evaporate from the surface. Best, Lynn C.