GNOCCHI MADE SIMPLE

i'm chef frank this is protocooks and today we're making gnocchi [Music] chef frank what is gnocchi great question gnocchi are dumplings they're usually dumplings from italy in some regions it's made with semolina in some regions it's made with cheese the one that i'm going to focus on today is gnocchi made from potatoes which i think is a little more recognizable to most americans this is what i got russet or idaho potatoes i want a starchy potato for this not waxy all-purpose flour or double zero flour if you have it eggs and salt making yucky is fairly simple there's not a lot of ingredients and it's all about the technique so that's what we're going to do today i'm going to show you my technique how to make light and tender gnocchi you don't really need a bunch of specialty equipment to make gnocchi now they make gnocchi boards and you can buy them online and these are a great little piece of equipment to have you can make gnocchi cavitelli with this you can make garganelli a lot of different pastas i happen to make these in my workshop because that's what i do and i happen to have them because i'm a chef and having this piece of equipment is really helpful it gives you really nice lines and it helps you roll out the gnocchi fairly easily if you don't have one of these it's okay most people have a fork in their house and i'll show you how to use the fork as well so let's get to it and get our potatoes in the oven the first thing we're going to do for our gnocchi is cook the potatoes and a lot of chefs and people that make gnocchi will boil these here's the big difference i don't boil mine right when you boil the potatoes you have a lot of excess water and i kind of feel like all that excess water is the enemy of making gnocchi i like to bake the potatoes not only do i feel like you get a better kind of more concentrated potato flavor but it also eliminates all that excess water you know normally when people boil the potatoes they have to put them on a sheet tray and dry them out if you bake them i feel you get a better product this is what i do i take my potatoes i leave them in the jackets and i wash them i will roll them in foil each potato gets rolled in foil and we're going to bake them until they're tender about 350 for about 45 minutes 30 to 45 minutes okay potatoes are wrapped put in the oven let them roast taters are done and this is how i test them you just squeeze them and they're soft it's just like a baked potato i have one more piece of specialty equipment i didn't talk about earlier is a potato ricer this is really important if you don't have a potato rice or i understand uh you don't necessarily need one you can break it up but ginoki might have a little lumps in it okay what i do now is i'm gonna peel the potatoes i take them all out of the jackets or out pull out of their foil okay they're roasted and i like to peel these when they're hot i like to make this dough while the potatoes are still warm i think it just comes out a lot better i don't want the potatoes to be hot but i do want them to be warm when i mix it towel so i'm going to burn myself right my ricer goes on my bowl okay get these out of my way a little i'm going to peel what i'm doing here is when i peel my potatoes i'm putting them in the towel i'm just getting a little bit of the skin pinching between my knife and my thumb and pulling it off that goes right into the ricer again so you'll see i take i usually just cut the top off but i get under the skin pinch the skin between my thumb and the knife and peel it back okay okay this goes into the ricer i got a few potatoes there squeeze rice gives us a nice smooth mixture and we're going to do this with all the potatoes if you have a food mill use a food mill um but if you don't have either of these just use a potato masher and mash them up really good potatoes are riced just get them off i use the back of my knife i want to ruin my blade get all the potatoes off and we'll mix potatoes are riced they're still a little hot so what i do is i push this up to the side and i'm just trying to get some of the the air i'm trying to get some of the steam out i'm not mixing the potatoes i'm kind of cutting them just kind of get some of that steam out you can see that my potato mixture is fairly dry and that's what i want i don't want this so hot that um it cooks the eggs i'm going to add a little salt now just to season this up and salt needs to go in there and i'm going to mix my salt in and again i'm going to do that cutting motion rather than then stirring cut fold over the top and cut this in okay so i don't really want to stir too much here right potatoes can get gluey when you stir them too much okay so this is still warm i'm gonna crack my eggs in three eggs to about two and a half pounds of potatoes if you get any shells use the shell to get the shell out shell attracts shell okay and that's what i'm going to do again i'm going to cut these eggs in i'm not really going to stir i'm just going to cut them in and fold i don't really want to start mixing this yet i'm just kind of cutting them in with my rubber spatula cut cut cut okay so now we're going to add our flour and i have about uh two cups of flour here i'm gonna put in most of it and again i'm just gonna cut i'm not going to stir i'm just kind of cutting my flour in while i turn my bowl so by the way this method took me many years to figure out to get the right consistency and folding i'm not kneading it all at this point you do have to knead this dough but for the most part i'm not doing that right now okay so i got my flour i got my eggs salt and potatoes okay i'm going to turn it on to my board i have kind of a crumbly mess that's okay i have a rubber bench scraper or a rubber um scraper here that this is like a pastry chef's uh favorite thing and what i'm gonna do is just kind of cut my flower a little more cut cut cut so my flower's incorporated and i'm gonna take this and start to lightly knead it and bring it into a ball right lightly knead it and bring it to a ball okay if it's sticky just a little bit of flour we don't want to put too much flour in this gather everything together and start kneading very lightly use your scraper to get everything off the board okay lightly flour if it's sticking right and that's pretty much all that i want to do a little bit of light kneading bring it all together and what i'm looking for here is that when i press in does it spring back it's not really springing back right so i want to just knead it just a little more i mean kneading doesn't take very long for this but i just want to work it so that the dough gives me a slight bit of spring back so we're kneading just a touch more flour just to keep it so it doesn't stick and that's it i think we're good i think i'm going to stop right there i have a nice smooth dough i press on it and i see a very slight spring back so what i'm going to do is i'm going to clear a spot off on my board a little bit of flour right just a dusting of flour on top i have my dough i have my kitchen towel that i peeled my potatoes with and i'm going to leave it covered the dough is done look at that in chiperty it's covered right and now we're going to roll it out and i have my gnocchi boards i have a couple of pieces of special equipment i'm going to show you how to use uh the gnocchi board okay uh and i'm going to show you how to use a fork right so it's important now at this point uh to put a pot of water up so i always have a pot of water up when i'm rolling because i'm going to blanch these or par cook them and then i'll reheat them later i think it just works best this way you want the gnocchi to set up in the boiling water and then you drain them really well and then you can use them you can bag them up and put them in the freezer or you can just use them and reheat them in your sauce later and that's usually what i do when i'm in the restaurant so i have my gnocchi board i have a fork i have some bench flour which is just flour to sprinkle on the table and i have my bench scraper and i have a cookie sheet or a sheet tray to put my finished gnocchi on okay so what we're going to do is start with this is i'm going to just put a little dusting of flour i'm going to cut my dough look at the inside of the dough that is nice right it's not wet and sticky it is dry to the touch here is what you want to do and the biggest mistake people make is they start to knead this again and you don't want to start kneading it again all i want to do is roll it into a long cylinder and roll it out right if it's a little sticky just a little more bench flower i find at this point a little flour is actually not a bad thing roll it out into like a nice long snake okay we roll it onto a snake i get my bench cutter and i cut into little nuggets so see my nuggets there that's what i want cut my nuggets and from this i'm going to shape my gnocchi there's some people that will just take this and uh and they'll just cook this and uh they serve it as gnocchi and it's perfectly acceptable right not a big deal if you want to just cut them like this you can throw them right into the water uh but what i do is this i take the gnocchi i roll it into like a cylinder and then i'm going to put the cut side down onto my board i push to make a thumb print and pull forward and roll it over and i have a beautiful gnocchi there look at that okay i'm going to do that a bunch more times i'm going to dust my tray so that they sit on there but the the thing with a beautiful gnocchi is ridges on the outside a small cup on the inside to hold the sauce okay i'm gonna do that again and again and again so cut side down onto my board roll it off cut side down push down roll it off you can see it's not sticking to my finger it is rolling right off we want that little cup and to me this is proper gnocchi i'm sure i'll get italian chefs that are shaking their fists at me and yelling that is not gnocchi but this is how i learned it did take me many years to kind of get this down just practice and messing with the dough getting it to the right consistency it takes a little practice you know you can make gnocchi with other vegetables but believe it or not i haven't had a ton of success with that sweet potatoes have a ton of liquid butternut squash has a ton of liquid so i just stick with the potato i think it's one of the best things but that's up to you to experiment with so again get my dough push down and forward on my board and i have a beautiful gnocchi okay now if you don't have a yucky board let's put those aside i have a fork you can use the back of a fork so you do cut side down push down and roll out so your bridge is a little bigger not as fine as the uh as the gnocchi board but it makes a really nice gnocchi as well so you turn your fork upside down roll flick roll flick i'll do it from the side so you can see that one i squished a little too much but you have the ridges now the gnocchi's rolled out i got my water boiling i have a tray i'm gonna salt my water okay whenever you make pasta you want your water to be sea salty so it looks like a lot but you need to season your water sea salt i put a little bit of oil on my tray because what i'm going to do is take my hot gnocchi out of the water strain them really well and put them on my tray and i don't necessarily want them sticking together i'm not putting enough oil in the tray to make them really oily i'm just putting enough on the tray to make them not stick my water is at a full simmer i don't want this to be at a hard boil okay because if it's really boiling hard then gnocchi kind of beats each other up and doesn't have time to set i just want a nice bubbling simmer right drop them in splash all over yourself get burnt right now we're just going to wait for them to come to the top i'll give a little bit of a stir so i can make sure they're not sticking to the bottom you can see they're starting to float to the top a little i'm gonna let them float cook so what's happening right now is the egg and the potato starch is coming together it's solidifying and uh so these won't break apart when we put them in the sauce okay so we let these come up so my gnocchi are floating i'm going to take them out tap off all the excess water spread them out of my tray give them a shake and i'm gonna do this until all of my gnocchi is cooked our gnocchi is cooked and cooled okay so at this point you can take this i usually freeze it on the tray once it's totally cool you can take it break it up put into a ziploc and you'll have gnocchi just reheat it like you would in the sauce or you can cook it right now in the sauce one thing i did do i save some of my pasta liquid what i'm gonna do now is i'm gonna heat some of these up with a little bit of butter and give them a taste and that's how i make gnocchi or potato gnocchi uh check that out can you see it oh my gosh i can't wait all i did was heat these up a little pasta water and butter but you can put any sauce you want on these now i'm sure there's traditional sausage you can put on them but at the end of the day it's your pasta you make it how you want it i like to serve these with a ragu or a meat sauce they're delicious also everyone everyone's eyes are always bigger than their stomach you don't need a lot of these they're even though they're light and fluffy they do fill you up quick so have a little and then get a little more if you're still hungry but they all the time me and my family we make these i make too big of a plate and we're all like oh my god i'm so stuffed because they are filling it's a potato dumpling okay so let's give it a taste light pillowy not too dense absolutely delicious and that's how i make my gnocchi i hope you enjoyed this video if you did give me a thumbs up like subscribe hit the little bell we try and do a video a week we have merch we have need salt t-shirts i control the salt t-shirts down below in the description we have a patreon account as well thank you patrons that i have already you help us do what i love doing cooking and teaching people how to cook um and uh if you want to mail anything to us we like to do mail bags or correspondence in the description we have a p.o box you can send stuff to uh but that's it that's my gnocchi i hope you enjoyed until next time have a good one

Channel: ProtoCooks with Chef Frank

Views: 72,237

Keywords: #gnocchi, #pasta, #potatopasta, #cheffrankproto, #chefdaddy, #cheffrank, #handmadepasta, #homemadepasta

Id: Nmg2SC-WLZA

Length: 15min 48sec (948 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020