Making your own pasta looks so easy. Mix some flour, water, eggs, etc and roll out the dough and presto! I've been wanting to try it but I haven't gotten around to it. Instead, I've tried making my own ricotta gnocchi, also known as gnudi, which apparently means "naked." I guess these are supposed to be like the filling of a pasta but without the pasta, hence the nakedness. My first encounter with gnudi was at Restaurant Zoe in Seattle. In short, it was heavenly. So I wanted to see if I could recreate a little bit of heaven in my kitchen too. In short, I could not.
Mario Batali's recipe for ricotta gnocchi seems simple enough. Eggs, flour, salt, nutmeg, and ricotta cheese. He suggested goat's milk ricotta but I couldn't find that and had to settle for regular cow's milk. I think I bought a reduced fat one by accident. I suppose the key here is draining the ricotta through a fine sieve overnight in the fridge to drain out the excess liquid. After a whole day in the fridge, hardly any liquid drained out. I think I should have taken that as a bad omen.
Here is what it looks like after all the wet ingredients are mixed together.
This is how it looks after the flour gets mixed in. The directions say to mix in more flour if the dough too wet and sticky. I ended up putting in a whole sh*t ton of flour just so I could handle the dough to make the little balls. It was still sticky up to that point but I didn't want leaden balls rolling around in my sauce.
After much blood, sweat, and tear, I finally had a tray full of gnocchi balls to boil.
Read more »
