Gnocchi

Variations

• Gnocchi alla sorrentina: Topped with tomato and mozzarella, baked.
• Brown butter & sage: Melt butter until nutty and add sage.
• Gorgonzola cream: Toss in a melted gorgonzola cream sauce.
• Ricotta gnocchi: Use ricotta instead of potato for a lighter version.

Tips

• Lefse states the pair outright, and it is the whole of this recipe. "That page peels and mashes the potato while it is hot and mixes straight away. Same two ingredients, boiled potato and flour, and the flour goes in hot in one and cold in the other — because the aims differ: gnocchi has to hold together in boiling water, lefse has to roll out like paper."
• Hot is what lets you use almost no flour. Lefse's own page gives the number: cold potato starch has set and released its water, so the flour has to take that water up and you need roughly twice as much — "and every extra gram makes it tougher." Hot potato is still holding its water, so a little flour is enough. That matters here more than there, since dough and gluten files gnocchi under doughs that are "barely worked at all — knead them and you get erasers": flour is the gluten you do not want, so the way to have no gluten is to add almost no flour in the first place.
• Which makes "starchy potato, kept dry" the same instruction again. Every gram of water in the potato is a gram of flour you will have to add to absorb it, so a floury variety baked or boiled dry starts you closer to the answer. And rice it rather than mashing it — mashed potatoes sets out the mechanism lefse borrows: shear the cells and amylose leaks out and tangles into glue, which is the same gluey failure from the other direction.
• They float when they are done, not when they are ready to be left. A dumpling rises as its starch sets and traps air, so floating is the finish line rather than a halfway mark — leave them bobbing and the outside goes on taking up water and turns to porridge.
• Use starchy (floury) potatoes and keep them dry so the dough isn't wet.
• Add the least flour possible — less means softer, chewier gnocchi.
• Bring the dough together gently; don't knead it long.
• Scoop the gnocchi out as soon as they float so they don't turn mushy.
• Freeze extras spread on a tray, then boil them straight from frozen.