Pasta + Terror

This is a horror story. Jk, but it is about my fear of making gnocchi and my deep love of eating it.

I got all my pasta equipment a couple weeks ago. I have made fresh pasta five times, two under the supervision of an instructor. I am not quick or confident, and have managed to screw up the pasta dough itself by overworking it, a mistake I have been told is nearly impossible to commit that requires one to totally start over. So I thought I'd turn to the very vague recipe in the definitive Italian cookbook (Silver Spoon) and make gnocchi.

The pasta snobs reading this are already like, LOLOLOLOLLLL. For everyone else, me deciding to make gnocchi at this point in my pasta-crafting history was like a beaver attempting to build a dam without having been born yet. Gnocchi, and in particular potato gnocchi (as opposed to ricotta), is the great challenge of pasta. "Pillowy" is the term you're going for here. I had been warned about my hubris in this area, but I grabbed my bag of flour and peeled some potatoes anyway. It's not like anyone was coming for dinner (which was the case the night I overworked my dough). The only person who'd be affected by a massive screwup was me.

Photo break!

I also foolproofed this plan by making a simple tomato sauce, something I'm very comfortable doing. If the gnocchi failed, as I was assured they would, I could cook up some dried pasta from Smart n Final and still have something awesome to eat. This is what I like to call the backup technique: if you have a backup, it takes the pressure off and you're more likely to succeed. I plan to publish many academic papers on this subject in an alternate universe where I wear glasses.

A perfect tomato sauce is different in everyone's mind. For me, it's the sauce at Bertucci's, an East Coast chain restaurant whose artichoke and portobello mushroom pizza I require my family to administer within twelve hours of my arrival at home. I want to tell you it's the childhood memory that makes it good, but no, every time I eat it, I'm fully on board with my basic bitch assessment that this chain restaurant is the pizza boss. I would love to open a franchise in LA. Who will give me the money to do so? The sauce is chunky and tart, so those are my flavor goals. To that end, I use crushed tomatoes, salt, pepper, sugar, white balsamic vinegar and plenty of fresh garlic and basil. I also do a pretty large chop on the garlic and fry it for just a moment in the oil before added the crushed tomatoes and letting it cook through in those, which gives it great flavor and a little more texture.

This is like half the garlic I used...

I made the sauce while my potatoes were cooking. The recipe told me to peel, chop then "steam" the potatoes. Wait, what? My steamer can fit like three pieces of broccoli on the days when I can even find the damn thing. I mostly use it for those frozen potstickers from Trader Joes on the occasion that I can't use my microwave because I just read something where Gwyneth Paltrow told me not to. I put some water in a pot but kept the level low, I thought. In reality, I boiled my potatoes. That's what I did. No idea how I would've steamed them. Off to a great start.

Is this a steam room?

The instructions told me to mash the potatoes while they were still hot. Garage sale masher in hand, I was all over this. Then I was instructed to stir in the flour, egg and salt and knead until I had dough. I poured in the ingredients, started kneading, and promptly burnt my hands on the still very hot potatoes. Here's the great thing about making pasta dough: when you fuck it up, your hands are a mess, so you can't do anything stupid like give up and look at pictures of your ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend's third husband on Instagram (Calvin, please DM me back, I feel like we could have a connection). I grabbed a spoon and did this "stirring" thing that had been recommended.

So far I've found every pasta dough recipe lies to you about how much flour you need. You need way, way more and the only way to know this is by the feel of the dough. But if you're inexperienced, like I am, and especially if you're making a new kind of dough, like I was, you don't know what this magical feel feels like. The recipe told me not to make the gnocchi too soft or too hard, but not what those things felt like in the gnocchi dough world. What the Silver Spoon cookbook presupposes is that you are an Italian grandmother with no time for nonsense and a perfect understanding of pasta, who received this cookbook as a gag gift from a close friend or an insult present from a power-hungry daughter in law who you call Angie, because the only Angela in your family is your great aunt, God rest her soul, and this upjumped pretender isn't family until she gives you a grandchild. My former high school dorm-mate, coincidentally current neighbor and reluctant pasta guru Lillian Kingery had warned me of this, but then she made me amazing Italian food and credited the book so clearly I had to buy that shit.

How it was supposed to look...

My dough was too wet, even I could tell that. So I kept adding flour and stirring and kneading and hoping and imagining all of this filtered through David Sedaris, author of the book I listened to while performing these tasks. Which took ages, of course. Pasta takes forever when you are a noob and also probably always. Dough at a somewhat acceptable feel (???), I set about rolling pieces of it into ropes, which I then cut up. The instructions wanted small, delicate gnocchi with a light thumbprint and a gentle rubbing with a grater on each one. Thumbprints, I did, though they seemed to smush my otherwise pillowy gnocchi. Smallness and grating? Who has the time? Some of my gnocchi looked super cute, but they all wound up looking like my last batch of uggos once I cooked them. I ended up throwing a little dough away when it all got too difficult.

Pretties, kind of!

Uggos, definitely!

Into the water they went. Gnocchi are done when they float to the surface, so I watched anxiously. My early, pretty gnocchi, made from sturdier dough that hadn't been lazing around my kitchen, floated quickly, at which point I scooped them out and plopped them in my sauce. The uggos floated more slowly, taking longer to cook, and they probably tasted different, but who's to say, cause they all ended up mixed up together? Oh, I was also supposed to taste my dough for salt level, but again, how salty was my dough supposed to be??

So how did my gnocchi, a labor of love that took two and a half hours, possibly more, stand up? Well, let's see. Were they pretty? No. Were they pillows? No. But were they a delicious combination of pasta and dumplings so who even cares? Big time. Honestly, I think even bad homemade gnocchi is delicious. Or maybe I'm secretly an Italian grandmother who thinks Angie and her cookbook should stay the hell out of my kitchen. The thing I learned about gnocchi and life is that some imperfect love in a bowl is better than frozen mac and cheese, it's not about the journey it's about the tomato sauce and that fresh parm and basil make everything look pretty which is why I now use both as makeup. But really, it's like my mom always says: "Perfect is the opposite of good."

I loved this.