Welcome to the world of gnocchi
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 4,5 € pp)
- Salt
- 800 g boned goat leg
- EV olive oil
- 400 g potatoes
- 50 g flour
- 50 g nettle leaves
- 1/2 litre vegetable stock
- 12 small onions
- 1 red carrot
- 1 yellow carrot
- the solid part of a can with tomatoes
- Fresh parsley
Gnocchi are a kind of fresh pasta, made with flour and potatoes or with flour and ricotta or with ricotta and spinach or with many other vegetables and herbs. Ready-made gnocchi are also available on the market, but their quality cannot ever reach the handmade ones. But don´t worry, you follow Democratic Gourmet, a web site who hates ready made products and teaches you to do everything by yourself.
To make potato gnocchi we use the oldest potatoes we have, as we need as much starch as possible and also as low humidity as possible, so that we would have to put as little flour as possible.
We boil the potatoes for the gnocchi ALWAYS with the skin, ALWAYS starting from cold water and ALWAYS in non salted water for about 40 to 50 minutes till very very tender. We peel them and we make them a purée. The purée should be as fine as possible without any hard pieces or lumps as our gnocchi pasta must have a silky texture. Therefore, it is obligatory to pass the purée for our gnocchi through a fine chinois, in order to ensure that there will be no pieces of potato left.
We have also to knead the potato – flour “dough” as less as possible, as the excessive kneading makes the gnocchi elastic, industrial and “cheap”. It is evident that the use of immersion or any other electrical component is prohibited, if we want our gnocchi not to remind us …….. potato-flavoured bubble gums.
We must use the less flour possible, as much flour turns the gnocchi gummy and reduces their potato purée filling. So use as less flour you can. Yes, I know that without flour the dough cannot be formed to small gnocchi as it has to be. That´s why it is added a small amount of it. And don´t mind if your homemade gnocchi are not perfectly shaped. The important is to be tasty and “fluffy”. The industrial ones contain a lot of flour and also other stabilizers, in order to be perfectly shaped. Your gnocchi must not have this awful texture.
A trick to form gnocchi without using a lot of flour is to freeze the dough for 30 minutes. The cold “pasta” can then be cut and formed much easier.
Another trick is to use “powders” instead of watery ingredients, as all problems are provoked by the humidity. What are the powders? Grinded dried ingredients which offer us taste and colour. But we will have a special reference to powders one day.
The procedure is the following: We put the purée in a bowl with some salt and we slowly add the flour. Especially for today´s preparation we also add the nettle leaves, blanched, strained, pat dried and trimmed.
Αfter mixing the flour and the potato, we make thin rolls from the dough mixture, which we then cut into small olive-sized pieces. We add flour at the gnocchi, so that they do not stick and we let them rest for more than 30 minutes, so that the moisture is distributed inside them.
Gnocchi must have a uniform texture and relatively equal size, so they must prepared at the same time but in slightly different shapes so that they do not look industrial. If our gnocchi have different texture or size, some will come out overcooked and some uncooked.
We boil the gnocchi little by little in well-salted and occasionally flavoured water. In total, the potato gnocchi will take about 2-3 minutes to boil. The traditional rule requires that we remove the gnocchi as soon as they rise to the surface of the pot, I leave them a little longer.
Many cooks carve the gnocchi with a fork to make stripes in order to help the sauce stick to the gnocchi. Useful but not necessary in all cases.
But let´s start our dish.
The day before we salt the goat and we leave it in the fridge. The day after we clean and pat dry it. We cut the meat in pieces and we brown it in olive oil. The browning must be light, otherwise the meat will become too dry, we just want to add some maillard aromas to the whole preparation. We deglaze with the stock and we check the salt. We reduce the heat to minimum and we let the meat simmer for 3 to 4 hours. When it is almost ready we add the solid parts of the tomato and continue for 10 to 15 minutes more.
Meanwhile, we trim the onions and we trim and cut the carrots in pieces. We steam them both, separately, till tender. We pass them from a cold pan for 1-2 minutes to remove the excessive humidity and to create some Maillard aromas.
We remove the meat from the DO and we bind the sauce by reduction.
Meanwhile in a big pot we bring to boil salted water. When ready, we cook the gnocchi.
We drain them and we carry them in the DO with the sauce. We add the carrots and we stir carefully. We check the saltiness of the sauce. We lightly heat the onions.
We put in plates, meat, gnocchi with carrots and sauce and onions, we garnish with chopped parsley and we serve.
