Gnocchi artisan style

This is my hand-cranked gnocchi maker, and it's been featured many times on the blog.  It makes those mythic gnocchi pellets that John's mother and grandmother turned out by the thousand.  I pull the old contraption out occasionally because he loves gnocchi, and the BeeBo type have the evocative power of Proust's Madeline to him.  Such is the power of our childhood food memories.

The dough must be extremely dense (i.e. lots of flour) or it sticks to the crank like glue. I add cooked, riced potato to lighten it, but you still wind up with rock hard nuggets. Then you have to boil the heck out of them to even make them edible.  Maybe you've guessed, this is not my favorite to make or eat.

In a fine Italian restaurant where the pasta is hand-made, the gnocchi is often described on the menu with adjectives like "soft, light, pillowly."

For a change, I made a small batch entirely by hand yesterday. Let's just call it quality over quantity.

I found a recipe on the Internet with just five ingredients:  flour, egg, potato, Parmesan cheese and salt.

Flour is added sparingly to the egg and potato, just enough to bind...

 And form a soft, sticky dough.

The rolled strips are cut into small pieces.

And then the "magic thing" with the fork happens.  Mine look a bit lumpy.
(Julie, I need a lesson on that technique.)

These are larger and much softer than anything that comes out of the old gnocchi maker. I put them in the freezer for a few minutes to firm up before cooking.

They sink in the boiling water...

And then rise in a few minutes-- all done.  Unlike the indestructible bullet kind, these fall apart if you boil them hard and long.

So, what did the birthday boy think?  Well, he said he never met a gnocchi he didn't like, and these were "kind of like" the ones in the shrink-wrapped package from Italy.

"Yes," I replied snidely, "but without all the preservatives and heaven knows what else that gives them a shelf life of 3 years."

Long story short, this was much more fun than wrestling with the machine, and start to finish it only took me about a half hour.  I even ate a few!   Maybe we'll have gnocchi more than once a year.