Gnocchi (pron: nyoh-kee)

On Sunday I was hit with a brutal reminder that gluten intolerances and Italian food do not go well together, especially in large quantities. But I think everyone would agree that homemade gnocchi is too hard to resist. Even if it did follow a night of pizza.

By now, I’m sure you have got the gist that every Sunday is a festa, and therefore every Sunday we have a big lunch. But this Sunday Afrodite arrived with her auntie, uncle and young cousin, Francesco, and we also invited Carmine and his friend Vincenzo over. So we were 9 in total.

Rather than write about our lunch, which was full of family dramas, I thought I would write about the gnocchi-making process. A while ago I asked Lina if we could make gnocchi together because it’s something I’d never made before. It turns out it is surprisingly easy. Mind you, all I had to do in the end was lay out the gnocchi for drying and cut some tomatoes. So maybe it’s not as easy as it looks.

To begin with, you must first peel and boil the potatoes, and mash them until smooth. Lina says you need approximately one potato per person, and 100g of flour per person (but it depends on the potato), some salt and one egg. It is also necessary to kneed the dough on either a wooden or marble bench top/board.

Gnocchi

Step 1: place the potato on the board in a ball, surround with a ring of flour, sprinkle potato with salt, and crack one egg on the top.

Step 2: squeeze the egg through the potato, and gently mix through, folding the potato as necessary until all flour is used. Continue to add more flour until the right consistency is reached. Try and maintain the pasta in a ball.

Step 3: one at a time, cut a small piece off the ball of dough, roll into a skinny snake, and cut the snake into 1cm pieces.

Step 4: (the painful stage) with one finger, press quite firmly whilst rolling each 1cm piece on the doughy and floury board (this part is necessary). You must put enough pressure when rolling the dough such that the gnocchi become kind of like shells; on the inside it should be a bit empty.

Rolling gnocchi

I’m useless at the rolling part, so luckily by this stage Carmine, who goes to a hospitality school (a type of college) and has made gnocchi for us before, had arrived and could help out with rolling the thousand little pieces of pasta.

Carmine rolling gnocchi; me placing them on the table

Step 5: place the gnocchi on a tablecloth to dry out a bit, sprinkle with extra flour if necessary.

A whole table full of gnocchi

Sugo

Step 6: cut the pomordori into 1cm cubes.

Me dicing the tomatoes - I needed to actually help

Step 7: pour about 1cm deep of oil into a pot, add one clove of finely diced garlic and heat. When oil is hot place the diced tomatoes into the hot oil and leave to cook until softened.

Home-made sugo

Putting all together

Step 8: dice the fior di latte into little cubes. This cheese is like mozzarella but much less salty, and much drier (though it still comes swimming in liquid).

Carmine dicing the fior di latte

Step 9: bring a large pot of salty water to a rolling boil, place the gnocchi into the water, ensuring that you stir the water so they don’t stick together. Cook until the gnocchi float – only a few minutes – and then drain.

Stress levels were high

Step 10: stir the gnocchi through the tomato sugo, spoon onto plates, and sprinkle with the fior di latte and fresh basil. Devour.

The disaster plate of gnocchi

Although our gnocchi were delicious, because it was so hot, and we had to wait so long for the others down at the beach while we drank aperitives and snacked on pretzel sticks to stave off hunger, the pasta had started to melt a bit, and they didn’t turn out as expected. In fact, Lina ended up mashing a whole lot of the gnocchi together and then throwing it on the table in fury, so we were a few short. Instead of going “short”, however, she cooked a whole other packet of fusili pasta that were the colours of the Italian flag. But unlike the boys, I couldn’t even manage my first plate of pasta let alone a second.

Fusili

After our pasta we had a dish of pork fillets slowly cooked on top of peas and finely diced carrots with a delicious smelling herb called “pepper herb” or something of the sort. Our contorno (side dish) was a mixture of cubes of aubergine, red, yellow and green capsicums, and potatoes cooked in lots of (read “too much”) oil, but was tasty nonetheless. All of which was followed with fruit and caffè as normal.

Our delicious contorno of aubergine, capsicums and potato

To get a break from the craziness back at home, I went down to the beach with Carmine and Vincenzo for a few hours to lie in the sun and chat. We walked home around 7pm and discovered that Lina had just finished making a fresh batch of ciambelle (Neapolitan donuts) with the leftover gnocchi pasta. All she did was add a bit of lievitor to make the dough rise and some water before deep-frying spoonfulls of the mixture, and then rolling in white sugar. Real ciambelle are the size of your hand with a whole in the middle. Even though I have never tried them, these seemed to be much better because they were fresh and warm. Besides, homemade food wins [almost] every time. 

Le ciambelle

That night we (Gino, Lina, Afro and I) went with some family friends to the Sagra della Marrocha, which is Abruzzese for corn cobs. The sagra was in a beautiful little town nearby, and was much bigger than the previous one, with far more tables and a bigger stage complete with several singers and orchestra. Given how much we had already eaten that day, we shared a plate that came with bruschette, a selection of salami and formaggi from the region, a bit of bread made from corn (gluten free!), the most delicious prosciutto crudo I have ever eaten, slices of fresh rockmelon, and a roasted cob of corn. Then we all got our own corncobs (a disaster in itself because they were all over-boiled and had turned to plastic).

We stayed here chatting and watching the synchronized group dances, waiting for the raffle numbers to be read out at 11:30. Around 11 the polenta (more corn-related food) was ready, and everyone went to buy bowls of creamed polenta covered in some sort of lamb and tomato sauce. It smelt quite nice, but not really my thing so I didn’t try it, despite several people on several occasions insisting (quite severely) that I try the dish. They are very pushy here when it comes to food.

When we discovered we hadn’t won the box of famous bocconotti nor the giant leg of prosciutto crudo, we went back to the car and drove home around midnight. It was a good night, but New Zealand’s sweet corn is ten thousand times better. This is not the end of the eating, however…next blog: ferragosto. If I thought I had seen lots of food before, this was a whole other story!