Gnocchi in Brown Sage Butter

You will need:

2-3 Russet potatoes

1 cup (maybe just a little bit more) all purpose flour

1 large chicken egg

A pinch of salt

2 Tablespoons butter

2 Tablespoons chiffonade sage

¼ cup parmesan cheese

Salt and pepper to taste

So good restaurant quality gnocchi is only something that Italian grandmothers and chefs with tall hats can make, right? Wrongidy wrong wrong.

For this post I wanted something easier than it seems, mind-blowingly delicious, and gosh darn impressive if you ask me. Enter those cute little delectable clouds, pillows of flavor, and pillars of Italian cuisine, gnocchi. A potato based pasta or dumpling (call it whatever you wanna call it) gnocchi has only a few ingredients you probably have in your kitchen right now and requires no fancy schmancy equipment or a fancy culinary degree (like I have). So get off your butt and start gnocchi-ing (but finish reading first)!

Grab yourself two to three Russet potatoes depending on the size. Biguns, 2. Itsy-bitsy, 3. Poke the shit out of ‘em with a fork and bake for about an hour on 400°. Make sure a knife slides in and out easily all the way around before you take them out and let them cool while you get one cup of flour and one egg ready. Open the potatoes up and scrape all the guts out of them and pass them through a food mill. Wait, what’s that? You don’t have a food mill? That’s okay, just use a potato ricer. Oh, you don’t have that either. Spread your steaming potato guts out on a cutting board and go to work on them with the tines of a fork. Mash and scrape until you have eliminated all the lumps. If you don’t’ get all the lumps out now, you’ll have lumpy gnocchi later and you will never get laid. I bet you want that food mill now, huh?

Once you have mashed the potatoes up with a fork and made them fluffy like cotton, mound them up and make a well in the middle. In the well dump ¾ cup of your flour, a heavy pinch of salt and crack your egg in there to make what looks like an egg, flour and potato volcano. Stir the egg up with a fork slowly incorporating the flour and the potato. Once it starts sticking to the fork too much and you have what we call “club fork,” start using your hands. Add a little bit of flour if the dough is too sticky. What is too sticky? If it sticks to your hands and the cutting board, it’s too sticky. I wouldn’t go over a cup and a half of flour, it will weigh down your gnocchi and you won’t get laid.

Once you have formed a ball and reached what you believe to be a good consistency of dough, knead it six times, no more, no less. Cut the ball into quarters with your bench knife or any knife, or just rip it apart viciously. Roll each quarter into a snake about a quarter to a half an inch thick and pretend you speak Parceltongue (Half-Blood Prince looks sick-awesome). Cut the snake every half inch into little dumplings and watch your gnocchis starting to form. Repeat with each quarter.

Bring a pot of heavily salted water to a boil and drop in your little pillows of happiness in groups of 10-15. After about one minute they should start to float to the top. Remove the floaters with a slotted spoon and submerge in an ice bath or just some cold water to halt the cooking process and make sure your precious little children don’t turn into mush. Once cool, drain on a paper towel lined plate. At this point you could toss them in some olive oil and store in the refrigerator for up to a week to be reheated with pesto, tomato or any type of creamy cheese sauce. Or you could be a badass and make some brown butter.

Melt two tablespoons of butter over medium-high heat. Smash a garlic clove with your huge, manly hands and drop it in there whole. Wait till the butter foams up and all the liquid is evaporated out of it and turn up the heat. Once the solids in the butter start to get brown, add about 10 of your gnocchi and a pinch of chiffonade fresh sage. Season with salt and coarse ground black pepper. Turn your gnocchis over to reveal a beautiful shade of golden brown and delicious and sauté on the other side for just a minute. Evacuate your sautéed gnocchis directly to a plate and top them with a child’s handful of parmesan cheese and a little more fresh sage.

Try not to devour them too fast as you will choke and die. It would be a decadent death, but an early one as well. See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? If it was then you’re a sissy and you don’t deserve the superpowers you get from eating gnocchi.