The real Italian Gnocchi

Italy is pretty famous for its food and gnocchi are one of those. Here is the traditional recipe that has been passed on by grandmothers to us. It can take up to 1,5 hours to get everything done, but trust me: it is worth it!

Ingredients:

• 800 gr potatoes
• 240 gr flour
• 1 Egg
• Salt

Sauce:

• Pesto
• Tomato sauce

Process:

1. Start by peeling the potatoes and cook them. You can either put them in boiling water (15 min) or in the microwave (15min).
2. Let them cool for 20 min, then mash them in a bowl. Ideally, you should mash the potatoes with a potato masher, if you do not own one you can use a fork. In this last case, make sure that the potatoes are cooked very well, almost overcooked. It will be easier to mash them.
3. When the potatoes reached a temperature at which you can work them, add in the bowl: flour, salt and the egg.
4. Knead until obtaining a non-sticky dough, add flour if necessary. It can take a lot of flour to make the dough non-sticky. Image 1 - Top Right side
5. When you achieved the right consistency, take a small piece of the dough and roll it until it becomes a small circular tube. Image 1 - Top left side; Image 2
6. Then cut it in small rectangular pieces and roll it onto a fork so that the small piece will get some stripes on it. This process will prevent the gnocchi to disassemble when cooking. Image 3 and 4
7. Now you got your first gnocco ready! Continue with this process until you finish all the dough.
8. When you are done, put some water in a pot and let it boil. Put your gnocchi inside and let them cook for 3/5 min. Take them out when they start floating on the top of the pot.
9. Add some sauce (tomatoes sauce or pesto) and enjoy your meal!

Tips:

• For rolling the dough it is preferable to use a wood surface. This will prevent the dough to stick on the surface.
• We recommend to always put flour on the surface before rolling the dough. This will help the dough not to stick to it.

Variants:

• You can put inside the potato dough some spinach or tomatoes so that the gnocchi will be red and green coloured. In this case, beside boiling the potatoes, you also need to cook spinach and tomatoes. Then add them in the third phase and knead everything together. The consistency of the dough will vary if you put tomatoes or spinach. Try to always reach a non-sticky consistency by adding all the flour you need. In the images below you can see that we made 2 types of dough: normal and with spinach.

Gallery

• Image 1 Raw dough and circular tubes

• Image 2 Circular tubes

• Image 3 Rolling the gnocchi on the fork

• Image 4 Ready Gnocchi