Looking for some comfort food to add to your cold-weather repertoire? Or maybe you want to line up a little culinary project for your next snowed-in afternoon? How about Ricotta Gnocchi from MIDA and MIDA Newton‘s award-winning chef-owner and expert pasta maker Douglass Williams. Soft and pillowy, the made-from-scratch bundles of heaven are easy to make even without a pasta machine – all you need is a plastic scraper, a bowl and a fork….and a little bit of guidance.
Ricotta Gnocchi from MIDA’s Douglass Williams
Ingredients
- 4 (overflowing) cups of ricotta, the best quality you can find
- 1 cup grated parmesan
- 1 whole egg
- 1 yolk
- 2 heavy pinches of salt
- 1 heavy pinch of ground pepper (5 cracks in the pepper mill)
- 2 pinches of ground nutmeg
- 1 3/4 cups type "00"/tippo "00" pasta flour
Directions
- In a bowl, add all ingredients except for flour. Use a household dinner fork to thoroughly incorporate the ingredients, everything should be homogenous, should take about 30 seconds.
- Add the flour in 3 parts, using a flexible spatula or plastic bowl scraper (chef's note: Ateco works best, they are one of the cheapest and most useful tools in the kitchen). Fold in the flour from the bottom of the bowl, spin the bowl a quarter at a time to incorporate all of the cheese at the same time you are folding in the flour. Once the previous addition of flour is over taken by the wet, add the next stage of flour. Don't over mix...
- Once all the flour is added, gently knead one or two more times and place it onto a floured table.
- Shape into a loaf, about 1.5 inches high and about 1 ft long.
- Dust the loaf with flour and cut a log about 1/2in x 1/2 in roll in flour and place on cookie sheet till ready to cook.
- Place into salted boiling water, wait till the gnocchi float to the top.
- Toss with a little pasta water, pinch of salt and pepper, parmesan, herbs and EVOO (extra-virgin olive oil), and you have got yourself one incredible meal.
